THINK PROGRESS
Last year, Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA) admitted
that voter identification efforts were designed to suppress Democratic
votes, telling a Republican Steering Committee meeting that Voter ID “is
gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Romney ended up losing the state, but Republicans still believe that
they successfully kept Democrats from supporting President Obama. As
Pennsylvania’s GOP Chairman Rob Gleason told Pennsylvania Cable Network
earlier this week, the party “cut Obama by 5 percent” in 2012 and
“probably Voter ID had helped a bit in that.”
The constitutionality of law is now being challenged before the state
Supreme Court, where statistician Bernard Siskin testified on Monday
that the measure would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of
registered voters, disproportionately affecting “Democrats and members of minority groups.” “By his calculations, Democrats are three times as likely
as Republicans and minorities are about twice as likely as whites to
lack a valid ID,” the Huffington Post’s Saki Knafo reported.
In December, Republican strategist Scott Tranter acknowledged
that “a lot of us are campaign professionals and we want to do
everything we can to help our sides. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID,
sometimes we think that’s longer lines, whatever it may be.” The Romney
campaign’s Wisconsin co-chair, state Sen. Alberta Darling (R), also suggested
that the Massachusetts governor would have won Wisconsin but for the
fact that the state’s voter ID law was declared unconstitutional by a
state court.
Although the laws’ supporters claim that they are necessary to combat in-person voter fraud, a voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud. One study found that 0.0002 percent of votes are the product of such fraud.
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