Please call your state senator’s office TODAY:
The Pennsylvania Senate is poised to vote on legislation that will disenfranchise thousands of voters — possibly as early as next week when the Senate returns from recess.
House Bill 934, which was passed by the state House last summer, would deprive voters of the right to cast a ballot if they do not show a valid state-issued photo ID card, with only a few limited exceptions.
This will particularly affect non-drivers (senior citizens who no longer drive, persons with disabilities, and residents of urban communities who travel by public transit), and the challenge of securing a non-driver photo ID card from PennDOT will be costly, difficult, and impossible for some.
Supporters of the bill have been unable to show any evidence of voter identity fraud in Pennsylvania, because safeguards against fraudulent voting are already in place in our state.
Worse yet, the legislation will cost Pennsylvania taxpayers millions to implement.
Long lines at polling places are likely to form, leading other voters to simply give up and go home.
You know what they’re trying to do. Pick up the phone and call!
Why is having ID to show a bad thing? I’ve lived my entire live with some kind of government-issued ID, from birth certificate onward.
So you carried around your birth certificate from the time you were first able to walk, until you went to get your SS card and driver’s license, eh?
Cool.
oh yes, b/c kong can do it, anyone can.
lots of old people, esp. in rural areas, never had birth certificates, or can’t for one reason or another recover them. especially if an original is required.
lots of people can’t afford the i.d. or live too far away from the offices where you can obtain them (in states with voter i.d. laws they have closed down offices, making it even harder) and don’t have cars or can’t afford bus fare. seriously, doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.
Birth certificates don’t have photos — or if they do, they sure won’t look like the 25 or 65 year old. Just sayin’.
And, here in Northern NJ, we sign the voter log-in book, which shows our signatures from the day we registered — and each time we voted. They are not regularly available for viewing, so it would be kind of hard to learn to copy the number of signatures necessary to change an election outcome. And, besides, it’s so much easier to hack the electronic vote counting machines and thus really affect the outcome.
The national ID law has made it necessary for everyone getting a driver’s license to produce, what was it, three or four forms of ID?from different categories– (my elderly neighbor had a hell of time renewing her license since her marriage certificate was in a synagogue long closed, and she had to prove why her last name differed from her birth certificate…I don’t recall how she finally resolved that issue, but she was extremely nervous about not being able to drive) — but not everyone drives, espcially after getting old enough to have issues with vision, inabiity to turn one’s head due to arthritis, lots of reasons. (I met a lovely young woman at my first epidural steroid shots session; she’s been in a terrible auto accident and could not drive because she could no longer turn her head enough to check both ways, etc. I felt terrible for her and her constant pain, plus this issue of losing her mobility. She no longer has a driver’s license.)
There was no problem with rampant illegal voting which required photo ID’s — but there was a Republican strategy of lowering voter turnout among groups which they viewed as being more likely to vote for Democrats or at least not vote for Repubs. And more likely to have problems getting those photo ID’s. Like the elderly nuns in Indiana who had voted forever but no longer could do so.
Somehow I think Major Kong knows all this…but I could be wrong.