ACLU Going After Pennsylvania Over Misleading Voter ID Ads
As we all know by now—or, at least, should—the Voter ID law is not in effect in Pennsylvania during the 2012 election. Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson stayed the law through 2012, and it will be dealt with again in early 2013. Until then, though the Voter ID law still exists, it is irrelevant.
But don’t tell the Pennsylvania government that. They’re still putting out advertisements as if it’s presently relevant, with slight tweaks. And this may be confusing voters. So, once again, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania is getting involved. They filed a petition today asking Judge Simpson to “order the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to stop disseminating false information about the need for photo ID on Election Day and to make it to clear to the public that ID will not be required to vote in the November 6 election,” according to a news release. From the release (emphasis mine):
According to the petition, the Commonwealth has circulated misinformation about the voter ID law to voters. Last week, thousands of Pennsylvania seniors received a mailing from PACE/PACENET, a program administered by the Commonwealth’s Department of Aging, that included a Dept. of State card about the voter ID law. The card incorrectly states: “Voters are required to show photo ID on Election Day.”
In addition, petitioners’ counsel has received dozens of complaints from people that they have heard and seen radio and TV ads that still say voters need photo ID to vote. As recently as October 11, some PennDOT locations were still displaying outdated posters and information telling people they need ID to vote. Pennsylvania’s voting laws prohibit dissemination of false or misleading information to the electorate about voting.
Additionally, as was reported by the Inquirer recently, the state sent out fliers to 34,000 retired Philadelphia city workers which inaccurately notes identification is required this election.
Philadelphia Weekly senior writer Tara Murtha detailed in her column this week how the changes in advertising and those on the website VotesPA have been anything but drastic: “Changes to the state website Votes PA.com in the wake of the court ruling, for example, were so slight that it was mocked on The Rachel Maddow Show,” she writes. “The small-font text in the image was changed from “Voters are required to show an acceptable photo ID before casting their ballot” to “Voters will be asked, but not required, to show an acceptable photo ID on Election Day.””
A law is a law even if it is stayed, and as the law will be in effect as soon as our enlightened judicial branch stops legislating from the bench (i.e. after this election is over), public service announcements concerning this law should continue.
The ACLU and the Commonwealth Court, as well as the Supreme Court of PA, are actually not the legislative branch of our state government.
Contrary to what the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been falsely telling everyone for months, the Voter ID law does *not* require voters to show an acceptable form of “Photo ID.”
In fact, this law says that acceptable non-photo ID’s are available to any Pennsylvania resident who provides PA with an acceptable “Affidavit of Sincerely Held Religious Belief” which says photos of themselves are personally unacceptable. Such non-photo ID’s include PA Drivers Licenses, Non-Drivers Licenses, Voter ID cards.
These facts were begrudgingly confirmed to me by Nick Winkler of the PA Dept of State. When asked why his department’s website says the law will require “Voters…to show an acceptable photo ID”, he said, “It doesn’t say “ALL Voters…” Talk about intellectually dishonest! These people have no credibility and are willfully disseminating disinformation to the public. They clearly don’t want people to know this.
The other un-reported Voter ID story is that besides voter suppression, this Voter ID initiative is a massive data grab of facial biometric data of a class of people our government did not yet have such data for. All this new and existing digital facial biometric data being collected by PennDOT is being shared with other state and local governments and Federal agencies–without any oversight or accountability.
Why? Facial biometric technology is rapidly advancing and large projects using it are currently being funded with large grants from the Department of Homeland Security and other Federal agencies. These systems can nearly instantly pick out faces in crowds from CCTV video camera feeds from local, state and Federal government surveillance cameras.
Who will your PA-digitized photo and facial biometric data be shared with? How will all this logged data–about where you go and who you publicly associate with in view of all these government CCTV cameras–be used? PA is not telling you any of this. And news media organizations are failing to report any of this.
-bernieS