Pa. Voter ID Court Case: 'We Know Injustice When We See It'
Jake Long, chair of the Harrisburg Region Central Labor Council ’s COPE committee and a baker by trade, does not spend most of his days in Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, but it did not take him long to form an opinion of the proceedings surrounding the court’s review of the state's contested voter ID law.
“It was clear that the voter ID law is nothing more than an attempt to keep large groups of people from voting,” he said after proceedings ended for the day. “This law is simply unfair and unjust.”
Long, who works full-time at the Hershey Co.’s plant in Hershey, Pa., was part of a group of local workers from AFSCME and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers ( BCTGM ) who turned out to hear the eighth day of testimony in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania case, observing the testimony of a contractor hired by the state's Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration to assess how many voters would be impacted by the new voter ID measure. The Corbett administration had originally claimed that 1% of voters would be negatively impacted by the voter ID law, including college students.
The ACLU, which is leading the prosecution, exposed a serious flaw in the Corbett administration’s assessment of the law’s impact on college students, finding that the administration only considered whether those students living within a mile of campus would be impacted. In many urban settings, many students live off campus and commute to class, raising questions of the assessment’s accuracy.
Long grew increasingly skeptical of Corbett’s original findings as the day progressed. “The numbers Corbett was using didn’t make any sense,” he said. “It just goes to show how this new system isn’t standardized or fair. It hurts retired people who happen to live in a nursing home that isn’t qualified to give out IDs to residents. If you don’t have a passport, if you weren’t in the military or have a military ID and you don’t have a driver’s license, you’re out of luck. There are too many loopholes, and it disproportionately hurts college students, people with disabilities and the poor.”
Outside evidence is also mounting against the Corbett administration’s initial findings. A statistical analysis released yesterday by the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO found, with 99% certainty, that between 35,000 and 36,000 Pennsylvania voters were disenfranchised by the new voter ID law in the 2012 general elections, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans among the disenfranchised by a ratio of 2.5-to-1.
