The PA Department of State sent out a letter last week ostensibly to notify registered voters on the no match list that their PennDOT ID either didn't match or wasn't there so there could be a problem voting in November. The real problem was that the letter sent out to thousands of PA voters never said anything about them being on that list. With November 6th around the corner, valuable time and taxpayer dollars were wasted.
Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, the architect of this law, said in his newsletter, ”The only people who will be disenfranchised by our new common sense voter photo ID law are those individuals who are trying to corrupt the voting process through election fraud.”
That and the letter from the PA Department of State prompted me to start an online petition on signon.org to postpone the voter ID requirements until after the election.
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I have been to five senior centers in the area in the last couple weeks and found people with ID that will not allow them to vote. Most of them thought it would be too much trouble to get the proper ID. Most of the IDs were expired PennDOT licenses or photo IDs. Only a few had never had any PennDOT issued IDs.
For them, though, the road to ID can be really difficult, especially since obviously they do not drive and only 71 of the 390 PennDOT centers do photo ID. If their birth certificate need to be verified, it will require two trips. If they are handicapped or have a medical condition, they can vote by absentee ballot which only requires the last four digits of your social security number, and I did hand out quite a few absentee ballot applications.
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If everyone who came out to vote had to not only sign their name like we have been doing, but also put in the last four digits of their social, which poll workers would have to check, that would have avoided a lot of trouble for seniors. That combined with mandatory training/testing of poll workers on procedures already in place, like checking ID if the signature doesn't match, would have worked wonders in avoiding any appearance or actual fraud without disenfranchising the least among us.
If you agree that this is too much too fast, please sign my petition to postpone the voter ID law until after the election.
