Pa. judge halts state's tough new voter ID law

HARRISBURG, Pa. — HARRISBURG, Pa. One of the toughest of a new wave of state voting laws was put on hold Tuesday as a judge postponed Pennsylvania's voter identification requirement just weeks before the presidential election.

The 6-month-old law in one of the most prized states in the election has become a high-profile issue in the tight contest between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Independent polls show a persistent lead for Obama in the state, but pollsters have said the requirement for voters to show a valid ID could mean that fewer people, especially minorities, end up voting. In the past, lower turnouts in Pennsylvania have benefited Republicans.

A top state lawmaker boasted at a Republican dinner in June that the ID requirement "is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." Republicans have justified the law as a protection against election fraud.

The law had drawn protests, warnings of Election Day chaos and voter education drives as the law's opponents began collecting stories of people who had no valid photo ID and faced stiff barriers in their efforts to get one.

The judge's decision Tuesday could be appealed to the state Supreme Court, but it could easily be the final word on the law before the Nov. 6 election. The ruling also allows the law to go into full effect next year.

Democrats have used opposition to the law as a rallying cry to motivate volunteers and campaign contributions. They accused Republicans of trying to steal the White House by making it harder for young adults, the poor, minorities and the disabled to vote.

In a statement, the Obama campaign said the decision means that "eligible voters can vote on Election Day, just like they have in previous elections in the state."

The state's Republican Party chairman, Rob Gleason, said he was disappointed.

Other states face similar debates over voting.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID law in 2008, and Georgia's top court upheld that state's voter ID law. But a federal panel struck down Texas' voter ID law, and the state court in Wisconsin has blocked its voter ID laws for now. The Justice Department cleared New Hampshire's voter ID law earlier this year.

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Frederick Douglass and Voter Fraud

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass,” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem “Lady of the Lake,” this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time.

It was a risky move. If required, the only identification Douglass could give the registrar may have been his address in the town directory. He possessed two pieces of paper, which would only have endangered him more. One was a fraudulent “Seaman’s Protection Paper,” which he had borrowed in Baltimore from a retired free black sailor named Stanley, who was willing to support the young man’s escape.

The second was a brief three-line certification of his marriage to Anna Murray, his free black fiancée, who joined him in New York just after his escape. A black minister, James Pennington, himself a former fugitive slave, married them, but on the document he called them Mr. and Mrs. “Johnson.” Douglass was at least the fourth name Frederick had used to distract the authorities on his quest for freedom. He once remarked that a fugitive slave had to adopt various names to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name ... but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.”

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Fortunately for Douglass, at the time Massachusetts was one of only five Northern states that allowed suffrage for “free” blacks (the others were Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

Blacks in many other states weren’t so lucky. Aside from Maine, every state that entered the Union after 1819 excluded them from voting. Four Northern states — New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin — had reaffirmed earlier black voter exclusion laws by the early 1850s. A few blacks actually voted in New York, but only if they could pass a stiff property qualification. The sheer depth of racism at the base of this story is remarkable, since in no Northern state at the time, except New Jersey, did blacks constitute more than 2 percent of the population.

We do not know when Douglass cast his first vote. It might have been in 1840, in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign mounted by the Whig Party for its candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison. If so, he likely supported the Liberty Party’s James G. Birney, who represented the first genuinely antislavery party, however small, in American history; it achieved some strength in the Bay State.

In 1848 he spoke at the national convention of the newly formed Freesoil Party, and after 1854, haltingly at first and later wholeheartedly, he joined and worked for the new antislavery coalition known as the Republican Party, which ran and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. To this day, that “Grand Old Party” still calls itself the “party of Lincoln” and still claims Frederick Douglass as one of its black founders.

And indeed Douglass saw himself as a founder of that party, but only many years after a group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.

David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale, is writing a biography of Frederick Douglass.

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Voter Suppression, Then and Now

New Haven

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

Kevin Stanton

It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass,” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem“Lady of the Lake,”this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time.

It was a risky move. If required, the only identification Douglass could give the registrar may have been his address in the town directory. He possessed two pieces of paper, which would only have endangered him more. One was a fraudulent “Seaman’s Protection Paper,” which he had borrowed in Baltimore from a retired free black sailor named Stanley, who was willing to support the young man’s escape.

The second was a brief three-line certification of his marriage to Anna Murray, his free black fiancée, who joined him in New York just after his escape. A black minister, James Pennington, himself a former fugitive slave, married them, but on the document he called them Mr. and Mrs.“Johnson.”Douglass was at least the fourth name Frederick had used to distract the authorities on his quest for freedom. He once remarked that a fugitive slave had to adopt various names to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name … but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.”

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Fortunately for Douglass, at the time Massachusetts was one of only five Northern states that allowed suffrage for “free” blacks (the others were Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

Blacks in many other states weren’t so lucky. Aside from Maine, every state that entered the Union after 1819 excluded them from voting. Four Northern states — New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin — had reaffirmed earlier black voter exclusion laws by the early 1850s. A few blacks actually voted in New York, but only if they could pass a stiff property qualification. The sheer depth of racism at the base of this story is remarkable, since in no Northern state at the time, except New Jersey, did blacks constitute more than 2 percent of the population.

We do not know when Douglass cast his first vote. It might have been in 1840, in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign mounted by the Whig Party for its candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison. If so, he likely supported the Liberty Party’s James G. Birney, who represented the first genuinely antislavery party, however small, in American history; it achieved some strength in the Bay State.

In 1848 he spoke at the national convention of the newly formed Freesoil Party, and after 1854, haltingly at first and later wholeheartedly, he joined and worked for the new antislavery coalition known as the Republican Party, which ran and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. To this day, that “Grand Old Party” still calls itself the “party of Lincoln” and still claims Frederick Douglass as one of its black founders.

And indeed Douglass saw himself as a founder of that party, but only many years after a group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.

A series about the complexities of voters and voting.

In Douglass’s greatest speech, the Fourth of July oration in 1852, he argued that often the only way to describe American hypocrisy about race was with “scorching irony,” “biting ridicule” and “withering sarcasm.” Today’s Republican Party seems deeply concerned with rooting out voter fraud of the kind Douglass practiced. So, with Douglass’s story as background, I have a modest proposal for it. In the 23 states where Republicans have either enacted voter-ID laws or shortened early voting hours in urban districts, and consistent with their current reigning ideology, they should adopt a simpler strategy of voter suppression.

To those potentially millions of young, elderly, brown and black registered voters who, despite no evidence of voter fraud, they now insist must obtain government ID, why not merely offer money? Pay them not to vote. Give each a check for $711 in honor of Frederick Douglass. Buy their “freedom,” and the election. Call it the “Frederick Douglass Voter Voucher.”

Give people a choice: take the money and just not vote, or travel miles without easy transportation to obtain a driver’s license they do not need. It’s their “liberty”; let them decide how best to use it. Perhaps they will forget their history as much as the Republican Party seems to wish the nation would.

Such an offer would be only a marginal expense for a “super PAC” — plus a bit more to cover the lawyers needed to prove it legal under federal election law — and no one would have to know who paid for this generous effort to stop fraud. Once and for all, the right can honestly declare what the Supreme Court has allowed it to practice: that voters are commodities, not citizens.

And, if the Republican Party wins the election in November, this plan will give it a splendid backdrop for next year’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of its great founder’s Emancipation Proclamation.

David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale, is writing a biography of Frederick Douglass.

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Mississippi Presidential Primary Voter Guide

The Mississippi presidential primary will be held Tuesday, March 13. The New York Times states there are 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention at stake in the Mississippi primary this year. Here's a guide for voters in Mississippi who want to participate in the GOP nomination process.

Ballot

There are eight candidates on the official Mississippi ballot. Choices are listed in alphabetical order beginning with Rep. Michele Bachmann and ending with Rick Santorum. There is also a slot for a write-in candidate. All four of the mainstream choices still in the race are on the ballot in addition to four people who have dropped out of the Republican race.

Polling Times and Places

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on election day for those who wish to cast ballots in the ordinary manner. Absentee ballots may be cast anytime at your local circuit clerk's office up to noon on Saturday, March 10. Mailed absentee ballots must be received no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, March 12, in order to be counted.

Polling places may be found on your voter ID card. You may also call your local election authority to find out your polling location.

What to Bring

The easiest way to identify yourself at the polls is to bring your voter identification card that you received in the mail. The registration deadline was 30 days before the March 13 primary. If you don't have your voter ID card and are registered, there are valid forms of ID you can bring with you.

Among those accepted forms of ID are a valid photo identification such as driver's license or state-issued ID card. A utility bill with your current address is also a valid form of ID that can match your name to a registered address. A current bank statement and paycheck may also be used, as long as it has your name and address listed together.

How to Vote

Mississippi has two ways to vote depending upon where you live. Optical scan ballots are one common way to vote in which voters fill out an oval using a number two pencil or a dark pen. Red pens are not allowed.

The other way to vote is with touch screen computers. The "Touch and Vote" system allows you to vote by touching a square next to a candidate choice on a computer screen. After all of the ballots have been filled in, you can print your ballot in the summary screen that shows you what choices you made.

You can go back and make changes at any time until your ballot is cast. Your ballot will be printed so you can review your choices. After it is printed, you can "reject" or "cast" your ballot. The touch screens will need to be activated by the election official at the polling place before you vote.

William Browning is a research librarian specializing in U.S. politics. Born in St. Louis, Browning is active in local politics and served as a campaign volunteer for President Barack Obama and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

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Pa. Republicans Aim to Pass Voter ID Legislation (ContributorNetwork)

Back in 2006, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that a largely Republican legislature passed that would have required voters to show identification before casting a vote in any election. Fast forward to 2011 and the Republicans are asserting their presence to bring photo ID verification to places of polling everywhere, reports he Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This time around, Republicans control the state House, Senate, and governorship. A bill that would require voters to show photo ID before having their say may speed through into law. Here is a look at some of the questions:

Why require photo ID to vote?

The main reason behind a photo ID requirement has to do with eliminating voter fraud, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. While the exact number of instances of voter fraud in Pennsylvania is somewhat unclear, in 2008 the GOP claimed that a community group, ACORN, had falsely registered voters to swing support in favor of soon-to-be-President Barack Obama. ACORN would soon after have a few problems of its own.

Would the be any exceptions?

While Pennsylvania Democrats attempted to place a number of exceptions to the photo ID rule via amendments to the bill, Republicans managed to shoot them all down. However, the bill includes exceptions for anyone with religious beliefs against being photographed and residents in care facilities that serve as their place of polling.

Will the state senate pass the bill?

State senators have said they will review the bill before acting on it. Since the legislation passed along party lines in the House, the Senate is likely to pass the bill along similar lines. By extension, Corbett, who is Republican, is likely to put his signature to the document.

Is the bill constitutional?

While opinions are somewhat split, the constitutionality of the law was challenged by state Democrats several times. The main sticking point is that photo IDs generally need to be purchased, which could come into play in the inevitable legal challenge to the legislation. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, other states are also grappling with the same problem. However, supporters are quick to point out that the law simply guarantees the constitutional right of one person and one vote.

Isn't it going to cost money to enforce the law?

In short, enforcement of any legislation costs money. As for how much, no one really has that answer, but Democrats claim the total could be millions of dollars a year, reports the Associated Press.

Jason Gallagher is a former travel professional and long-time Pennsylvania resident. These experiences give him a first-hand look at developing situations in the state and everything included in the travel industry from technology to trends.

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