Are you Abe Vigoda? No, Are you Abe Vigoda?

I was wondering just how much more Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature can possibly suppress voting, confuse voters or otherwise ensure that Republicans have the advantage, even though Pennsylvania is already one of the most tightly controlled states in the nation when it comes to election law and despite that there are now more registered Democrats (4.1 million) than registered Republicans (3 million) statewide.

We already cannot:

• Vote by mail as Oregon and Washington do.  Voting by mail greatly reduces the states’ costs of having to provide and man polling places and purchase voting machines and it greatly increases voter turnout, which is, of course the opposite of what Republicans want to do.

• Vote early as nine states do, in some cases up to a week before Election Day, which also greatly increases voter turnout.  Early voting decreases the long lines that we saw, for example, in Ohio in the 2004 election, and it makes it much more convenient for workers who might have to take off Election Day to vote because we still insist on having elections on Tuesdays.  Maine’s new conservative legislature enacted a ban on early voting in 2010 but voters approved a referendum overturning it Nov. 8.  Ohio voters have submitted more than enough signatures to place a referendum on the ballot in 2012 to overturn a similar 2010 ban in that state.

•  Have a referendum.  No way, no how do the people of Pennsylvania ever get to directly express their will on any important issue.  Don’t you often wonder how come California, Colorado and other states can put questions on the ballot but nobody in Pennsylvania ever does?  That’s because Pennsylvania law simply does not provide any mechanism whatsoever for voter initiative and referendum.   You could gather the signatures of every voter in the state to place a question on the ballot and still could not do it.  The Legislature may place specific bond issues on the ballot, but even then, the question has to be approved two years in a row before it can be put before the voters.  Local referenda are allowed, but statewide, you cannot even amend the state constitution by public referendum.

• Register to vote or change your party registration on Election Day.  Don’t be daft!  Many states allow same day registration, but that loosens the reins the parties have over their members too much for Pennsylvania politicians to handle.  Here you have to be aware that you must register or change your registration at least 30 days before the next election in order to vote in that election and you have go to your local election bureau to do it.

•  Mail in an absentee ballot.  You have to jump through countless hoops: first you have to apply for an absentee ballot, and then you must deliver the ballot to the county election bureau in person within a week before the election, unless you are traveling or disabled, in which case you must have someone apply to be your designated agent to deliver the ballot.  And if you suddenly become disabled just before an election, you have to go to court to get an emergency absentee ballot!  

•  Know whether we are voting for Republicans or Democrats for judges and school board members by looking at the ballot, since these candidates usually cross-file in both party primaries, a deliberately confusing and infuriating practice.  The idea is to discourage partisanship in these positions of sacred public trust where party should not matter.  But somehow, it is only Republicans who get elected to the judiciary in Delaware County.  I want to know the party membership of judges and school board members in this day and age of corporate control of the courts and advocacy of Creationism and abstinence sex education only in schools.   By the way, have you noticed that most lawn signs for candidates rarely identify party affiliation? 

So what’s a good Pennsylvania Republican to do to suppress voter turnout even more than all these restrictions already do?  Why require each and every voter to show a state-approved photo ID to a poll worker on each and every election day, just to make sure that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Abe Vigoda and Marilyn Monroe don’t actually show up to vote.

Republicans are terrified of voter fraud, even though there has been no reported cases of people actually showing up at the polls to impersonate someone else to vote in many, many years.  

Yes, in 2008 there was voter registration fraud.  That is a different thing.  That is when someone enters a fake name and address on a voter registration form, but those people did not then show up at the polls.  Voter-registration-drive workers, who were being paid according to how many new registrations they brought in, were making up those names merely to be paid.  The state Legislature was quick to outlaw that procedure after the 2008 elections.

So having already made it as difficult as possible for people to vote, all the Republicans have left is Voter ID.  House Bill 934 has sped through the General Assembly and is sitting in a Senate committee awaiting action to require photo IDs, which will cost the state government an additional $4.3 million to enact and greatly slow down the voting process. 

The law would require non-drivers to go to their local PennDot service agency and obtain the state-approved photo ID, but since the ID would only be for voting purposes, the state cannot charge people for that service.  That would be a poll tax and poll taxes are unconstitutional.

So college students from out of state, the elderly and non-car-owning city folk (usually Democrats) will be greatly inconvenienced, perhaps to the point of not participating, on the pretext of preventing even a single Mickey Mouse or Abe Vigoda from getting past a less than vigilant poll worker on Election Day.  

Republicans especially hate all those Swarthmore and Haverford and Bryn Mawr College students who register to vote in presidential elections and who tend to be liberal.  Don’t be surprised if you see legislation to push the registration deadline back to before these students show up on campus to eliminate these dastardly newly enfranchised citizens from voting.

But no matter how hard the Republicans try, they’re still stuck with all those Democrats in the evil big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and increasingly their suburbs.  If they could only come up with a way to make sure that only Republicans could vote.