aichele

The argument for Pennsylvania's new voter ID law was flimsy to begin with — to protect the integrity of the voting process from a nonexistent fraud problem. But now even this cover has been blown.

House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, one of the Republicans who guided the voter ID bill through the Legislature in March, was listing recent legislative accomplishments at a meeting of the Republican State Committee in June, when he added: "Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done."

Is there any way to view Turzai’s comment other than a candid admission of the partisan motive for the law? When the bill was passed, Republicans hailed it as a victory against the scourge of people showing up at the polls trying to impersonate other voters.

Instead, they were following a national GOP agenda to make sure people without photo IDs — for the most part, elderly and poor people who don't have driver's licenses, who also tend to vote Democratic — would have to show other valid IDs or go to the state Department of Transportation to get a non-driving photo ID.

This week state election officials answered an important question: How many people are affected? The state now says more than 758,000 registered voters lack PennDOT-issued photo IDs, about 9 percent of all registered voters. Compare this figure with estimates by Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele, who previously said 99 percent of voters already had a valid photo ID needed to vote. The new law does allow other photo IDs to be used, such as passports, student IDs with expiration dates, up-to-date military IDs, and IDs issued to government workers.

Plenty of people, in the wake of a backlash against the new law, wanted to know what the fuss was about. After all, they said, we have to provide a photo ID for many other transactions.

Well, now we know the numbers behind this partisan power play. They are substantial, and they could tilt a presidential election in a swing state. That's what Turzai was speaking to, even if it wasn’t meant for general public consumption.

Corbett and legislative Republicans are sticking to their fraud-fighting story. What they’ve accomplished is to make it more difficult for a select class of Pennsylvanians to vote, in an attempt to concentrate the power of one party. Republican lawmakers and Corbett used a similar stratagem in redrawing legislative districts to protect majority-party interests.

The best hope now is that an appeals court will look at the cause and effect of this law and call it what it is: An obstacle designed to keep one segment of people away from the polls, or deny their rights once they get there. That task will fall to Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson, a former Northampton County judge. Simpson will hear arguments at a hearing July 26. It’s in everyone’s interest to get this settled in time for the November election.