Last week, The BRAD BLOG’s legal analyst Ernest Canning reported on the lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the ACLU in Pennsylvania, together with the Homeless Advocacy Project and the Advancement Project, against the state Republicans’ new polling place Photo ID restriction passed into law in March.
The law, unless it’s blocked, is set to make it much harder, if not impossible for many previously-legal student, elderly, minority and urban dwelling voters to cast their vote this November.
Canning predicts, however, that, like a similar GOP law in Wisconsin this year, and one in Missouri back in 2006, the new attempt to remove voting rights will be found in violation of the fundamental right to vote guaranteed under Pennsylvania’s state Constitution. We’ll see if he’s correct.
In the meantime, the lawsuit, Applewhite vs Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [PDF] names 11 plaintiffs, the majority of whom have tried to get a birth certificate in order to then obtain their so-called “free” ID to vote from the state under the new law — only to be told there is no record of their births. Several of those plaintiffs, not surprisingly, were born in the Jim Crow south and are now facing the forces of disenfranchisement again under the GOP law this year even up in the Keystone State in 2012.
We interviewed one of the plaintiffs in the case recently, 90-year old Joyce Block, on our KPFK/Pacifica Radio show. That interview is here.
Last week, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton interviewed the lead plaintiff in the complaint, 92-year old Viviette Applewhite who marched for civil rights alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Georgia, and who has been voting in Presidential elections without a problem for more than 50 years. She has never had a driver’s license and, though she says she paid a fee for a birth certificate from the state, she has never received it.
Despite the fact that state officials have been unable to produce evidence of in-person, polling place impersonation — the only type of voter fraud that could possibly be deterred by polling place Photo ID laws — Republicans seem more than happy to disenfranchise long-time voters like Applewhite and potentially tens of thousands of others this year.
Applewhite says she believes it’s all little more than an effort to stop President Obama from being re-elected, and she fears there are far more people than many realize who will be disenfranchised this year unless the law is overturned.
“Looks like most of the people in my building, they’re senior citizens, but they don’t have the proper thing to vote with,” she says near the end of the interview, “and it’s going to be a whole lotta people that’s not going to be able to vote”…
Judith Browne Dianis, civil rights litigator at the Advancement Project also appears in the interview above and correctly notes: “This is not about preventing fraud, it’s about preventing voting.”
She is supported in that contention, ironically enough, by PA’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett, seen in a clip above exhorting his supporters to help him keep turnout below 50% during his recent election. Moreever, just after Corbett signed the GOP’s voter suppression bill in March, he lied to the media by claiming that it was needed since Pennsylvanians had seen 112% voter turnout in some precincts. Longtime election watchdog Marybeth Kuznick of VotePA, however, told us the Governor’s claim was “ludicrous.”
For more on the plaintiffs in the PA complaint who are facing disenfranchisement for the first time in their lives — folks like 59-year old Wilola Shinholster Lee, 72-year old Grover Freeland, 86-year old Dorothy Barksdale and 93-year old Bea Booker — and why Ernie Canning predicts the new legal challenge will be successful in the Keystone State, see his report from last week right here.
What’s pull-your-hair-out ironic about the governor’s 112% turnout talking point is that there have indeed been instances in other parts of the country where indeed the machines have made those numbers so, not ghost voters. I vaguely recall there’s a story right here on this blog about those votes were actually counting in spite of the impossible turnout numbers.
Hey, Brad.
Check out my posts from DailyPaul, about the time of our first scamming caucuses.. I was SURE the votes in Iowa had been messed with and wished I had video’d the computer screen as I had watched very fishy numbers (on C-SPAN). So, I thought about it and decided to sign on to DailyPaul, post a blog, begging folk to VIDEO their VOTES and caucuses and conventions. I could not believe the resistance I was met with. But, then went to RevPacLive, the night of STUPID Tuesday, and talked with delegates and more serious supporters, to say the same thing.
And this is where we GOT the videos. People had NO idea they could not video this stuff, so I told them they could. I was right, the mainstays (neocons) of the GOP did not think we could “get away with” making these videos and posting, but we HAVE and it’s them who’re getting away with nothing. Many state chairs have been unseated due to FRAUD. Ron Paul delegates have taken eleven states, thusfar, and more conventions come up tomorrow.
We don’t cry fraud at every turn. We cry fraud when it’s evident, and it’s been evident in MANY places! This is why I now have my own blog- to alert the masses!
Oh, and to Michael G.?
The Hack-a-Vote2000 has been changing votes and stealing votes (misappropriating votes) since Gore “lost” to Bush. This is why WE have mainly paid attention to the caucus states, because people are more difficult to fake than votes.
Still, things that have been done to mess with Ron Paul delegates (while we ARE Republicans and fought hard to get there) are amazingly disgusting.
In Alsaka, Paul delegates were forced to pay between fifty and five-hundred dollars to vote in this FIRST (supposedly FREE) caucus. They were, of course, not told this before getting to the door of their caucus site(s). And, they were told, also, that the money would have to be paid immediately, while credit-cards were NOT accepted. Friends of mine, who planned on being delegates for Paul, came home and were very upset. The emails I received from them were horrible. This is the way Americans hold and run elections? Some people went out to vote, and because Alaska has such odd hours, daylight-wise, they changed voting times from afternoon to mornings, the Romney campaign used their robo-calling (not the only time) to advise that places and times had been changed, when it was not truthful info. And, nobody in the media is talking about all of this?
To Brad; this IS what I am talking about when I say, FRAUD. If a candidate, or his wife, places phone calls to constituents to provide them with inaccurate information, to PREVENT THEM from VOTING, it is fraud, and said candidate should be forced to step down. Fraud is happening.
It’s happening everywhere!
If you do get to vote…however hard it might be we still don’t have assurance that that vote will be counted correctly. See link below. Sad, I live in Florida
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/despite-state-oversight-vote-counting-errors-abound-in-2344835.html
The GOP “12 cases” of “voter fraud” out of 31 million cast is a vast overstatement.
The only form of “voter fraud” that can be prevented by polling place, photo ID legislation is in person voter impersonation. Photo ID will not prevent absentee fraud, registration fraud or election fraud in the form of insider manipulation of an e-voting system.
And the correct number of in person voter impersonation cases in PA is “zero!”
And with that, ALOHA Brad!
How does this woman participate in society without ID? You can’t drive, go to school, work or do alot of other things. Why should this person vote when she obviously does not participate much in society? BTW it is the law to have ID, why are people always making such a big fuss about common sense? ID is how we are tracked through our whole lives. How is she getting SS or cashing checks ?? You liberal idiots need to get a grip!!
I am from Pennsylvania, and often describe it as Philadelphia in the East, Pittsburgh in the West, and Alabama in the middle. The Keystone State has been like this as far back as I can remember, and I’m sixty. Pennsylvania still has an active Ku Klux Klan.