HB 1318 started life as a modest proposal to protect the right of members of the military service to vote in Pennsylvania elections. It has since been amended in the House of Representatives to be the immoral equivalent of Jim Crow.
One amendment would bar felons who have been released from prison the right to vote while they remain under probation or parole. A second would require every citizen to produce a government provided identification card in order to vote.
Together, these two amendments might bar 150,000 Pennsylvanians from voting. (There are 80,000 felons who have been released from prison. We don’t exactly know how many people don’t have government issued IDs or won’t have them when the go to the polls. It is not unreasonable to think that there are 80,000 people who fall into this category.)
Who will be hurt by HB 1318
These two amendments will have the effect—and are intended to have the effect—of reducing the number of voters who are likely to support progressive, liberal, and Democratic candidates. Felons are disproportionately African-Americans and poor while those with out ID cards are likely to be disproportionately senior citizens, the poor, and urbanites who do not drive (and thus don’t have the most common government issued ID.)
It is not just the poor, senior citizens and African Americans who who will be blocked from voting. Imagine how much slower the process of voting will be when everyone must produce an ID card and the Republican inspectors at the polls challenge the right to vote of a significant number of people. Long lines and delays will result. And some portion of the voters will decide that they can’t wait to vote. Long lines are already more common in urban areas which are also where liberal, progressive, and Democratic voters are more likely to be found. And, of course, members of the working class, who have much less flexibility at work than professionals and managers, are more likely to find voting impossible when there are long lines and delays.
The putative justification for these new requirements is the existence of massive voting fraud in Pennsylvania and, they suggest, especially in Philadelphia. However the Republican sponsors of these amendments have provided no evidence of such fraud, because there is none to be found.
We certainly have ethical problems galore in Philadelphia but no responsible group or editorialist has ever claimed that mass electoral fraud is one of them.
HB 1318 is part of a national strategy of voter suppression
So, let me repeat: HB 1318 as now amended is a deliberate and shameless attempt to suppress the votes of the poor, the elderly, African Americans, members of the working class, and Philadelphians generally. What is more, it is a scheme that has been hatched by Republicans in Washington who are encouraging their cadre in the states to do whatever they can to keep the supporters of Democrats from voting. The Republicans know that they are unlikely to turn some states, like Pennsylvania, blue through honest means. So they are trying to corrupt our electoral process in their effort to save Rick Santorum and deliver Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate in 2008.
What You Can Do to Stop HB1318
The Senate version of the bill is a bit better than the House version as it does not ban parolees from voting and allows for a wider range of identification materials, such as a utility bill. The Senate Rules Committee voted today not to concur in the House version of the bill. So the next step is a House-Senate Conference Committee. If the conferees the bill goes to Governor Rendell. So contact your state legislators and demand that the bill be killed or changed back to its original, innocuous state. You can find your legislators and quickly send them a fax with the Hallwatch fax bank service. Or you can find phone, mail and email contact information for state legislators in the whole state at the General Assembly website and for state legislators in Philadelphia and for Governor Rendell at the Neighborhood Networks website.