If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

The Voting Rights Project sent letters to registered voters in Port Allegany District II, where I live. I am glad to see this, and look forward to seeing what information is developed about participation in the election that I hope you voted in a day or two ago (as you read this).

The letter points out that your vote is secret, but your voting record is not. Or, to quote the letter, “Who you vote for is your secret. But whether or not you vote is public record.”

Voter registrations are a matter of public record. That is, the list of registered voters is available in the Court House.

Also, the list of the registered voters who came in and signed the book and went through the voting process is compiled from the records submitted by the local election officials.

It will be interesting to see whether our percentages of voter participation are higher or lower or scarcely changed, as compared with past elections. The Voting Rights Project, undertaken by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) aims to see whether the repeated efforts to require voter ID, with photo and expiration date, in Pennsylvania, have left enough confusion in their wake to discourage some registered voters from voting.

Also, have these attempts to impose a cumbersome voter ID dissuaded some eligible residents from registering? I don’t believe this study will tell us that. But my guess is that it has.

The Voting Rights Project letter states, “In Pennsylvania, if you have voted at your polling location before, you do not need to show any type of ID. If you are appearing at a polling place for the first time, you must bring identification, but it does not have to have your photo.”

Of course, “polling location” does not mean the exact location of the polling place in your precinct or voting district—those do change now and then. It means your voting precinct, district or ward. For instance, a few years ago Port Allegany District II voted in the United Methodist Church. Then for several years voting was in the Free Methodist Church. Now it is in the Evangelical Covenant Church. But all these would be considered the same “polling location.”

If you have voted in the same location, even once, even in the spring primary, you do not have to show ID to vote there again.

We have only to think about what it is like, to vote hereabouts, to realize the Voter ID legislation was a solution in search of a problem. As voters walk in the door, some member of the local elections officials will say his name to the others, and his page in the book of voters will be found.

We did not have voter fraud in Pennsylvania. It was so rare that legislators and other officials were unable to cite instances, let alone proof  it had been a factor in any election.

In June of 2012, at a Republican State Committee meeting, Mike Turzai, Republican Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, famously listed among the House’s accomplishments, “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

There would be some groups of people who would be inconvenienced more than others by voter ID laws, just as African Americans in southern states were disproportionately dissuaded from voting, before the Voting Rights Act. The measures used then were poll taxes and literacy tests. The literacy tests were constructed along lines that would eliminate many people who had been educated in the inferior schools to which people of color were consigned.

Whom would the voter ID laws inconvenience most seriously? One class would be non-drivers. Another would be handicapped persons, who might find polling places barrier-free but find it more daunting to get into the PennDOT facility where the IDs could be obtained.

Here I am, legally blind, not qualified to drive. To get a non-driving ID I would need to go to Bradford, taking with me the various proofs of identity that would result in issuance of a photo ID. I went through the photoID a few years ago, to receive an ATA identity badge. The team came to the Senior Center and took our photos and printed them and laminated them and provided the badge on the spot. Problem is, there is no expiration date on it, so it would have been rejected as a photo ID for voting purposes.

As it is, the voter ID law has been struck down by the courts, at least twice. Let’s hope no one tries to revive it!

The example of myself, and other non-drivers in the area, serves to point up how mindless the measure was. Imagine the District II election officials having to tell me I was not allowed to vote, or could vote only with a provisional ballot, because I lacked a suitable ID with an expiration date! Every one of them knows me by sight. I doubt that I have missed voting in District II since 1978.

Early in the 1970s there was the case of the Alfred Seven. These were seven Alfred University (Alfred, N.Y.) students who had been refused voter registration and thus were not permitted to vote in the upcoming election.

It was a town-vs.-gown thing. The local election officials wanted to keep those college students, all presumed to be transients, and probably hippies and trouble-makers, or at least liberals, from interfering with local government.

But, as their attorney, Richard B. Tolins, pointed out in a landmark case, the students in question lived in the community more than half of the time, and several had no other possible voting address. Under the Permanent Personal Registration in force in New York State, they were qualified to register and vote in the town or village of Alfred. Attending college did not disqualify them. Length of residency, if more than 30 days, was not a factor, for them or others.

Meanwhile a former sheriff of the county, kept insisting on his right to vote in Friendship, where he owned property. The local board of elections (I was a member) tossed him off the rolls, inasmuch as that property was a vacant lot, with only a tree on it. Unless he could verify that he resided in that tree more than half of the time in any given year, he could not vote in our village.

In Pennsylvania you can choose any possible valid residence as your voting residence. Quick, legislators. Plug that loophole!

Peace.