The editorial board of One Step Away, Philadelphia's street newspaper, met Tuesday morning and discussed HB 934, Pennsylvania's proposed Voter ID law. The editorial board, made up largely of people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness, issued this editorial:
So the state of Pennsylvania, while arguing that they have to cut services and trim spending on education, homelessness, mental health services and public sector jobs because they don't have any money, somehow found $11 million that they can throw around for no good reason at all. While proving completely unable to provide solutions to real problems, our elected officials have instead set their sights on something that isn’t actually a problem -- the myth of voter fraud.
Voter fraud in Pennsylvania does not exist. Voter fraud across the country does not exist. Anyone who says differently is ignorant, or lying. Or both. The Pennsylvania House, nonetheless, has passed HB 934, a bill requiring voters to present photo ID when voting. And the bill made it out of Senate committee Monday, and appears headed for a Senate vote.
Since 2005, there have been eight people reported to the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, an agency for the General Assembly, in cases of voter fraud. Eight. In that time, the state has seen about 24 million votes cast. Eight in 24 million is what mathematicians refer to as “not very many.”
And yet instituting a voter ID bill will cost state taxpayers $11 million, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. And there is no evidence that voter ID legislation eliminates even those eight cases over six years, even at such a staggering cost to the taxpayer.
In the House, every Democrat voted against this measure. All but one House Republican voted for it. Why do House Republicans want to waste your money like this? Because the true voter irregularity they’re trying to fix is that sometimes people vote Democratic.
HB 934 would make it even more difficult to vote for older Pennsylvanians, students, racial minorities, people with disabilities, and lower income people to vote. These are the groups who are disproportionately likely to not hold a valid state-issued photo ID. They also, and surely this is a coincidence, disproportionately vote Democratic.
The Department of Transportation estimates that 700,000 Pennsylvanians – fully eligible to vote, with the right to vote as citizens of this great nation – lack photo ID. Half of those are senior citizens.
While weathering the bureaucracy involved in acquiring an ID may simply be difficult, paying the various fees involved in procuring ID can be a practical impossibility for those living at or near poverty. The net effect is a de facto poll tax, and the end result is often that people will simply give up and decline to go through it – and this is how these laws suppress the vote.
Every once in a while someone while someone will call Voter ID bills a return to the Jim Crow days. This is incorrect.
Jim Crow laws were intended to hurt African-Americans and make it difficult for them to achieve any political strength. The wave of Republican-led voter identification laws across the country are intended to hurt Democrats. It’s partisan, not racial, discrimination.
The inflammatory act of calling people racists doesn’t help the debate. They’re not racist. They’re not acting illegally; the US Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s photo ID law in 2008 – although the Court noted that “the record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.”
That’s good to know, considering enacting the Indiana law cost taxpayers $10 million.
They’re just horrible, and horribly stupid. And now Pennsylvania is one of several states considering it. It’s madness. It costs taxpayers millions of dollars. It does not fix a discernible problem. And it’s a naked attempt to undermine elections. The problem with democracy in this country is not that too many people are voting. This attempt at voter suppression must not stand.
We urge the Senate to knock this nonsense down, and vote down this bill.