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A Pennsylvania judge on Friday struck down a key portion of the state’s voter ID law and permanently enjoined officials from enforcing the election-day requirement that voters show ID before being allowed to cast a ballot.

Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley said the state’s voter ID Law was intended to provide free and liberal access to an ID for those who lacked the requisite identification.

Instead of free and easy access, the judge said, state officials created a burdensome and confusing regime that resulted in de facto disenfranchisement of qualified Pennsylvania voters.

“This Court holds that the photo ID provisions of the Voter ID Law violate the fundamental right to vote and unnecessarily burden the hundreds of thousands of electors who lack compliant photo ID,” Judge McGinley wrote in his 50-page opinion.
Critics of the law cited comments reportedly made by the House majority leader that the voter ID requirement would allow Mitt Romney to carry Pennsylvania over Barak Obama in the 2012 presidential race.

Various experts estimated that between 320,000 to 1.3 million Pennsylvania voters were without required photo IDs. The Voter ID Law mandated that the state would provide “liberal access” to anyone needing identification.

Judge McGinley said the state failed to provide “liberal access.”

“As a constitutional prerequisite, any voter ID law must contain a mechanism for ensuring liberal access to compliant photo IDs so that the requirement of photo ID does not disenfranchise valid voters,” the judge said.

But the resulting mechanism to provide free ID was too burdensome, the judge said.

“In the majority of its applications, the Voter ID Law renders Pennsylvania’s fundamental right to vote so difficult to exercise as to cause de facto disenfranchisement,” he said.

Despite the large number of citizens lacking ID, officials had distributed only 17,000 IDs for voting, he said. The judge added that for many citizens – those lacking a driver’s license – obtaining an ID to vote would be a substantial ordeal.

Pennsylvania has 71 offices where such IDs are issued, five of them in Philadelphia. But there are no such offices in 9 counties, and the offices in 13 counties are only open two days a week, the judge said.

McGinley also noted that Pennsylvania officials had failed to show any evidence of a problem with voter fraud that would justify the new law.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal,” Judge McGinley wrote. “Further, a substantial threat still exists to the franchise of hundreds of thousands of registered electors, and uncounted qualified electors.”

He said the threat was continuing more than a year after the initial litigation despite efforts by Pennsylvania officials to educate voters and provide compliant ID to those who lack it.

The judge said his injunction blocking the Voter ID Law would preserve the integrity of Pennsylvania elections. “By contrast, denying the requested relief would only add to the chaos in implementation and inaccurate messaging that has ensued since the statute’s enactment,” he said. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2014/0117/Pennsylvania-judge-guts
-voter-ID-law-calling-it-burdensome

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