Mitt Romney's chances of winning Pennsylvania's electoral votes were dealt a serious blow on Friday as a Commonwealth Court judge issued a permanent injunction against the enforcement of PA's strict voter ID law. In the ruling, Judge Bernard L. McGinley noted that, despite compelling evidence that the law would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, the state did a poor job of explaining why the law was necessary, in the sense that they did not even attempt to do so:
And old people, and rural people, and people who don&#039;t drive, and students in state schools, and veterans (whose government issued I.D.s were not admissible because <i>they don&#039;t have an expiration date</i>. The entire law was written like this:
1. Identify the groups most likely to vote Dem. 2. Add a clause excluding them.
I was doing nonpartisan voter reg in PA when that law was implemented. For a while, I spent all my time talking to old people who were registered and had voted all their lives, but who hadn&#039;t had a driver&#039;s license in decades, who had no means of getting to a motor vehicles office to get an approved ID (much less stand in line for 4 hours), who had no idea where their lease was (and were understandably suspicious when a total stranger asked them to find it), or any other means of &quot;proving&quot; they lived where they lived.
Then there were the working people, especially night-shift workers, who couldn&#039;t hope to get to the one office in the county (open 2 days a week, 9 to 4), to get a new ID card.
Then there were the instructions, downloadable if you had an internet connection and knew how to find the site, which were incoherent and for a while had wrong hours on them. Yeah, and I was doing voter reg in trailer parks, where people did not have a whole lot of Internet. Apparently the state put some info signs on buses; not so useful in rural areas without bus service.
And then, after a judge finally ruled in October that the law could not be enforced, there was the GOP flyer that was distributed to all polling places, stating that poll workers could still <i>ask</i> for an ID but couldn&#039;t refuse to let someone vote who didn&#039;t have one. Just to try to chase a few people away who had actually gotten to the door. Nor that the flyers said anything about whether or not the poll workers were supposed to pick and choose which people they &quot;asked,&quot; of course.
An estimated 1 to 1.5 million people are thought to have been disenfranchised in PA in November 2012. The good news is: Obama carried the state anyway. The bad news is: next time, the law may get written more smoothly. And to get rid of it cost a fortune, and diverted resources.
Ask me how I feel about flag-fucking GOPers claiming to be more patriotic than me.
I&#039;ll make an incisive and germane comment once I have stopped laughing at the incredible joke at the end of the post.
Rand Paul, indeed!
I am surprised he didn&#039;t bring up illegal lizard people votes. I hear it&#039;s a really big problem in Pennsylvania.
Lemme guess . . . every single example of a fraudlent vote was NOT FUCKING COUNTED.
Just sayin&#039;.
And old people, and rural people, and people who don&#039;t drive, and students in state schools, and veterans (whose government issued I.D.s were not admissible because <i>they don&#039;t have an expiration date</i>. The entire law was written like this:
1. Identify the groups most likely to vote Dem. 2. Add a clause excluding them.
Those are both made up names. There can&#039;t be actual places with names like that.
There just can&#039;t.
Imma post this just one more time, for smilez. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watc..." target="_blank">" rel="nofollow noopener" title="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOT1bRYdK8">http://www.youtube.com/watc...
I was doing nonpartisan voter reg in PA when that law was implemented. For a while, I spent all my time talking to old people who were registered and had voted all their lives, but who hadn&#039;t had a driver&#039;s license in decades, who had no means of getting to a motor vehicles office to get an approved ID (much less stand in line for 4 hours), who had no idea where their lease was (and were understandably suspicious when a total stranger asked them to find it), or any other means of &quot;proving&quot; they lived where they lived.
Then there were the working people, especially night-shift workers, who couldn&#039;t hope to get to the one office in the county (open 2 days a week, 9 to 4), to get a new ID card.
Then there were the instructions, downloadable if you had an internet connection and knew how to find the site, which were incoherent and for a while had wrong hours on them. Yeah, and I was doing voter reg in trailer parks, where people did not have a whole lot of Internet. Apparently the state put some info signs on buses; not so useful in rural areas without bus service.
And then, after a judge finally ruled in October that the law could not be enforced, there was the GOP flyer that was distributed to all polling places, stating that poll workers could still <i>ask</i> for an ID but couldn&#039;t refuse to let someone vote who didn&#039;t have one. Just to try to chase a few people away who had actually gotten to the door. Nor that the flyers said anything about whether or not the poll workers were supposed to pick and choose which people they &quot;asked,&quot; of course.
An estimated 1 to 1.5 million people are thought to have been disenfranchised in PA in November 2012. The good news is: Obama carried the state anyway. The bad news is: next time, the law may get written more smoothly. And to get rid of it cost a fortune, and diverted resources.
Ask me how I feel about flag-fucking GOPers claiming to be more patriotic than me.
I don&#039;t have any jokes that can top the joke that is this entire disenfranchisement situation.
They seem nice.