Palli: Pennsylvania voter ID laws undermine democracy

Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law, with its supposed effect on the upcoming presidential…Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law, with its supposed effect on the upcoming presidential election, has been a high-profile news item recently. Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny, proudly said it “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Democrats have denounced these measures as attempts at voter suppression.

It is clear that disenfranchisement is, in fact, the aim of this law. According to News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, there have been only 10 reported cases of in-person voter fraud since 2000.

Legal arguments over the state’s new voter ID law resumed on Thursday in Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court, with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups challenging the law and trying to prevent it from being implemented for the upcoming presidential election.

The most repulsive aspect of all of this is the undermining of individuals’ right to have a say in government; American citizens have the right to vote regardless of who they are. The right does not require that they pay for a state ID, nor that they can take off work to obtain such an ID while the DMV is open. They simply have the right to vote. Attempts to curtail that right fundamentally clash with our system of representative democracy.

Putting these ethical claims aside, will this law have the drastic effect on the election that Turzai predicted?

Though polls say President Barack Obama is leading Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney with an estimated 49 percent and 42 percent of the vote, respectively, this leaves a crucial 9 percent undecided. Furthermore, early September polls have not historically had that much predictive power in presidential elections.

So, to examine the worst-case-scenario effect of these laws, let’s examine the closest presidential election in Pennsylvania in the past 20 years: George W. Bush versus John Kerry. In this election, 5,731,942 Pennsylvanians voted, and Kerry won the state by 144,248 votes. This is approximately 2.5 percent of the electorate.

So what percent of the electorate will be prevented from voting by this new law? To have a realistic number, we will use ABC News’ claim of 1.3 million Pennsylvanians. This is a moderate estimate, since Gov. Tom Corbett estimates the percent of citizens without ID to be 1 percent, and the Philadelphia Inquirer reports up to 18 percent of citizens in Philly don’t have ID. This discussion, however, misses the point: not all citizens without necessary ID would have voted in the first place. Making the assumption that these people vote in the same proportions as other people, we can say that 10.2 percent of the electorate would no longer be casting a vote.

The next question is which 10.2 percent of the electorate? According to the Brennan Center for Justice, demographics such as minorities, the poor and the elderly are groups who compose most of the nation’s 11 percent of citizens without photo IDs. Spotlightonpoverty.org tells us that low income people voted 56-41 for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.

Assuming this remains the same, Obama would gain a 15 percent edge from the voters being disenfranchised by new laws, but these voters only constitute approximately 10.2 percent of the voter base. That gives a total of 87,713 votes cut from a theoretical Obama lead — much less than Kerry’s razor-thin margin of victory in 2004.

The possibility remains that this massive disenfranchisement will affect other elections; this is, sadly, especially possible for local elections for the very politicians that enacted such backward measures. What is forgotten in the Republican quest for the White House is that American citizens, regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status or tendency to vote for the opposing party, have the right to vote.

With the total lack of reported voter fraud, it is certain that these laws will affect the election and disrupt democracy in a much more meaningful way than voter fraud likely ever would in the United States. This is a clear case of politicians meddling for the gain of their party at the expense of the electorate.

The fact that the house leader was willing to make blatantly corrupt and factually deficient claims sheds light on the poor state of American politics. Through this year’s mudslinging and abysmal news coverage, it is difficult, though not impossible, to remember a time when respectful opponents debated real issues.

These new voter ID laws and subsequent comments would have been met with outrage in a time when politicians might disagree, but fundamentally understood that the American people had the right to direct their actions. Instead, such atrocious comments are accepted as part of the political reality of the present day.

We, the citizens, must make politicians understand that democratic institutions still mean something. This is the real world, not a chess match between Democrats and Republicans, and it’s time that our political leaders started acting like it. Though we see that the ultimate result is unlikely to change in Pennsylvania this year, all the citizens denied a vote by burdensome bureaucracy still deserve to have their voices heard.

Write Rohith at rohithpalli@gmail.com.