Oct 5, 2012 5 min read

Well, how about that?

When you’re requiring voters produce photo identification in order to cast a ballot for the first time in our state’s 225 years of existence, turns out seven months isn’t enough time get the word out to the entire state.

This week, a state judge blocked Pennsylvania’s controversial Voter ID law — for this year, anyway — because the state hadn’t done enough to ensure eligible voters wouldn’t be denied a vote. Under the law, which is among the nation’s toughest, a photo ID was required to vote, and if you did not have a photo ID at your polling place, you had all of six days to produce one or your provisional ballot would be tossed.

However, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson ruled that if the law took effect immediately, he was “not convinced … that there will be no voter disenfranchisement,” according to the Associated Press. In the six months since the law was put in place, Simpson felt the state had not made it possible for voters to easily get IDs before Nov. 6, making voter disenfranchisement for the presidential election a distinct possibility.

The numbers back this up. According to the state’s own records, 758,000 Pennsylvanian voters, or 9 percent of all voters in the state, don’t have proper identification under the new law. Only around 11,000 photo IDs have been issued since March, according to Bloomsberg News.

“I expected more photo IDs to have been issued by this time. I accept petitioners’ argument that in the remaining five weeks before the general election, the gap between the photo IDs issued and the estimated need will not be closed,” Simpson wrote in his decision.

As a result of Simpson’s injunction, election workers will still be allowed to ask voters for a valid photo ID, but people without it can use a regular voting machine in the polling place and will not have to cast a provisional ballot or prove their identity to election officials afterward, according to the Associated Press. The law could still take full effect next year, although Simpson could also decide to issue a permanent injunction.

Despite what some have suggested, I’m not against the idea of requiring identification in order to vote. I am, however, against the idea of unnecessarily rushing the implementation in a way that would result in benefits for one political party (just on accident, of course!) to the point where they were bragging about how it would lead to victory in the presidential race.

And it was an unnecessary rush. It’s not as if there was a need to enact the law in order to avoid impending voter fraud — because there is no voter fraud to prevent. As part of the initial lawsuit against the bill, the state’s own attorneys formally acknowledged that there is no reported in-person voter fraud in the state and even without a Voter ID law there isn’t any reason to expect any fraud in November.

So setting aside whether we even need such a law to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist, trying to rush the ID requirement before there was sufficient time to do it right was a bad idea — one that undermined the good things people might see in the law.

If you believe that showing ID to vote is not unreasonable, it should also strike you as logical to ensure that this change is not sprung on voters. I argued in this space back in July that it was simply common sense that if you’re going to potentially block eligible voters from casting a ballot, you should do everything in your power to minimize that chance. In other words, if the goal is to stop fraud, the result should not be to hurt lawful voters — even if they don’t have a driver’s license.

(And despite some people’s limited personal experiences, yes, there are decent, eligible voters out there that don’t have a photo ID.)

And while I heard plenty of knee-jerk reaction that seven months was more than enough time to get an ID, the issue was never about the time it took for a person to get the ID. Rather, as Judge Simpson ruled, the time frame was not sufficient enough to inform all voters in the state that they would need an ID and then have them get the identification.

And it’s not just “the others” who may have been disenfranchised by this law: even for those who already have an ID, the word needed to get out that it must be up-to-date and match exactly with your voter registration card (hope you updated both, newly married ladies!).

So in the end, while you can assume that many or even most voters either had an ID or knew they needed an ID, the simple fact remained that voting is supposed to be available to all eligible voters — not just many or most.

And arguing that if these voters don’t know they need an ID by now, they’re too uninformed to vote doesn’t cut it either. There’s no aptitude clause in the Constitution; being a low-information voter does not disqualify you from being allowed to vote.

And that’s why the Simpson’s injunction is the right decision: it means that if we’re going to require an ID to vote, we aren’t going to unnecessarily rush the implementation of it.

If you’d like to see his long-form photo identification, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.