The Justice Department is looking into Pennsylvania's voter ID law, with every day important now as Republicans there are trying to eliminate as many valid Democratic voters as possible in order to win by default. The impact in urban Philadelphia could be far worse than previously thought as
potentially more than 40% of the voters there could lose their right to vote this November.
The number of Pennsylvanians who might not have the photo identification necessary to vote this November has more than doubled: at least 1,636,168 registered voters, or 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters, may not have valid PennDOT-issued ID, according to new data obtained by City Paper. In Philadelphia, an enormous 437,237 people, or 43 percent of city voters, may not possess the valid PennDOT ID necessary to vote under the state's controversial new law.
“Those are the numbers we sent,” says Nick Winkler, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, when asked to confirm the data. “If you want to add them together, I think it's misleading.”
The new data, received and processed by the AFL-CIO, for the first time includes voters who had PennDOT licenses that have (as of Monday) been expired since Nov. 6, 2011 or an earlier date. If those people do not renew their licenses, the licenses will be expired by at least one year on election day and thus invalid under the new law. And because the AFL-CIO's voter file (which shows the already-publicized large number of voters with no PennDOT record) is seven months old, it could actually represent an undercount since it does not address whether those who have registered as voters since January have valid ID.
In other words, as many as 1.6 million Pennsylvanians could be forced to cast provisional ballots, ballots that will almost certainly not count and will be thrown out.
Only 62% of those ballots were counted in 2008, and that was when the number of provisional ballots cast
nationwide was 1.7 million. There's no way that all those voters reasonably could comply with getting their ID shown in person at the election board office within six business days, all but guaranteeing that hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots will be rejected and these voters will lose their right to vote.
More importantly the loss of hundreds of thousands of votes in urban areas will hurt Democrats far more than Republicans, all but assuring Republicans maintain permanent majorities in these states. But "protecting the integrity" of a handful of votes is more important than taking the right to vote away from millions across the country in 2012, millions of Democratic votes, especially.
This is how Republicans plan to win it all in November and all but eliminate the Democrats from power.
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