Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

voter ID

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ACLU Wants Voter ID Law to Remain on Hold

The plaintiffs in the voter ID case are set to file papers today asking the Commonwealth Court to extend the block on the voter ID law. It was stopped only for the November election.

“Even though there is not a big presidential election, the right to vote is important.”

ACLU Legal Director, Vic Walczak says plaintiffs want to extend Judge Robert Simpson’s order halting implementation of voter ID until a final decision in the case, possibly even a decision by the state Supreme Court, is reached. He says it’s important to ensure voters can cast a ballot in the primary and in other elections.

“A year after passage of the law, less than 20,000 people have gotten one of these voter IDs. And the most conservative estimate is that there are at least 100,000 people without IDs. So if you do the math, there’s at least 80,000 people who still need ID to vote.”

Pennsylvania Department of State Spokesman Ron Ruman says the Commonwealth is in a holding pattern until the court rules on whether allow implementation of the law.

“We’re really looking for direction from the court.”

Read more.

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Senate Hearing on “Voter Suppression”

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to examine Americans’ access to the voting booth and the continuing need for protections against efforts to limit or suppress voting.

On Wednesday, the committee will look at barriers voters experienced in the 2012 election — some reports said voters in Florida waited seven hours to cast their ballots. Democrats have said the some Republican controlled state legislatures passed laws last year that harm voter rights and the results were shown in Election Day failures.

“A spate of recently passed state voting laws seemed designed to restrict voting by making it harder for millions of disabled, young, minority, rural, elderly, homeless, and low income Americans to vote,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. “The long-lines, increased use of provisional ballots and changes to voter registration rules in the last elections have raised new and troubling questions about the ability to protect every eligible citizen’s right to vote.”

Read more.

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ACLU to Challenge Constitutionality of Voter ID Law

This morning in Commonwealth Court, the next steps could be decided in the legal battle over Pennsylvania’s new law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls.

The law passed the GOP-controlled legislature last spring, and was promptly signed into law by Gov. Corbett, a Republican. Since then, it’s been the subject of a long – and, at times, nasty – legal fight, with the ACLU and other attorneys for plaintiffs in the case arguing that it will disenfranchise voters, particularly the young, the poor and the elderly. They have also argued that the free ID cards the state was offering through PennDot were laden with bureaucratic landmines, and required voters to produce official documents that many could not obtain.

In early October, with just weeks to the presidential election, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. agreed to temporarily block the law from going into effect – but the injunction only covered the presidential election. Simpson left the law intact, and so it will apply to elections going forward.

The ACLU and other attorneys in the case have sent strong signals that they intend to continue fighting to overturn the law for future elections as well.

Read more.