Voters must show identification before voting in 35 states, but in Pennsylvania and 14 other states without the requirement, voter ID has become one of the election integrity issues that divides people along party lines.
Democrats believe requiring voters to provide ID will disenfranchise people, especially those too poor to obtain identification, although those who eat likely have ID. Identification is required to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Pennsylvania Republicans believe ID is a necessary layer of security in preventing people from voting more than once.
“Voter ID should fit in with, let’s make it easy to vote, or, let’s make it hard to cheat,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Russ Diamond told The Epoch Times. “The vast majority of people have some form of ID. You can’t function in life without some form of ID. Let’s make sure that, when people show up to vote, they can establish that they are, in fact, who they claim to be. It goes a long way towards satisfying people when they have questions about our electoral system.”
Diamond is a member of the Pennsylvania Election Law Advisory Board, which met Wednesday, May 31, and started a broad discussion about two voter ID options to consider.
The first option said the board would not recommend a comprehensive Voter ID law but would recommend expanding the current list of ID options that would be accepted from first-time voters. The second option would be recommendations for what the general assembly should consider if it pursues legislation requiring identification for all voters.
Currently, in Pennsylvania, ID is required only the first time someone votes in a new jurisdiction, but not in elections after that. Instead, election workers compare the signature of voters to the ones they made the previous year.
Diamond asked the board to vote on which of the two options it wanted to pursue in the discussion, and soon, the lines of division on the board were visible. They voted 8-6 to discuss voter ID for all.
“Voter ID is not a top priority for me or for the Committee of Seventy, but I think there are versions out there that would at least minimize the disenfranchisement,” said board member Pat Christmas, chief policy officer at the Committee of Seventy, which describes itself as a “civic leadership organization that advances representative, ethical and effective government in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania through citizen engagement and public policy advocacy.”
ID Options
If the Legislature considers requiring voter ID, it should allow electronic forms of ID such as a photo of a driver’s license on the phone, board member Christina Iacono asserted.“We are in a digital world now, and we have people that use devices. They might use their phone to pay for things instead of carrying a credit card or a wallet around. So I'd like to allow for digital verification by showing if you have a picture of your license on your phone, that should be acceptable,” Iacono said during the meeting. “Same thing with a current utility bill or bank statement. I don’t get bank statements in the mail. I haven’t gotten bank statements in the mail in years. I do all digital. So I should be able to show proof of that by showing that digital proof by a phone.”
Diamond opposed that idea, saying that with image-editing software, it would be easy to create a photo of a fake ID.
Christmas said it would be important to provide voters with many ID options, that is, current or out-of-date IDs with or without photo, and if they don’t have an ID, let them vote anyway by signing an affidavit.
“This is where I would be concerned with disenfranchisement: if someone does show up on Tuesday, and they happen to not have one of the approved photo or non-photo options…or they’ve just forgotten— they just don’t have it on them—that they'd be able to sign an affidavit and use a voting system as they usually would,” Christmas said. “I think those two pieces are critical, at least for me, for it to be a policy that won’t disenfranchise folks.”
Iacono agreed with Christmas.
“I’m a fan of the affidavits because they do that in other states that have voter ID, and it allows for a quicker result process. You don’t have as many provisional ballots in the precinct if this is an issue,” Iacono said. “And the other very important thing to note here is that if someone signs an affidavit and they commit voter fraud, they are committing a felony. They are guilty of a felony. If you really want to see if this is a problem, this is the best way to do this. You will then have a record of the voters that are committing said felony.”
The board did not discuss how such a felony would come to light. Instead of affidavits, some suggested provisional ballots would be more effective.
“I would not agree that just signing an affidavit works. The problem with that, at least in our county, whether you sign an affidavit or not, once you have submitted that ballot into the machine, it’s in there. It’s counting, regardless of whether somebody proves you were a valid voter or not, and that’s the whole purpose of voter ID, if we go that route,” Snyder County Commissioner Joe Kantz said during the meeting.
“The only way this works is to have that person vote provisionally so that that vote can be adjudicated as to whether or not they were illegal voters. If they were an illegal voter, no one is disenfranchised. If it goes in and they were not an illegal voter, every other voter has been disenfranchised.”
Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary for Elections and Commissions at the Department of State, is not supportive of voter ID.
Tabled Discussion
The board tabled discussion and will pick it up the topic at their next quarterly meeting, which has not yet been scheduled.“I would hope we can get through this conversation and have everybody acknowledge that it is the will of the board and actually offer a recommendation to the General Assembly about voter ID for all voters and make a recommendation that ensures that everybody who’s voting is eligible to vote, is who they say they are, without disenfranchising a single voter,” Diamond said. “We may make that recommendation before the 2024 election, but as far as getting it legislated—I would highly doubt that getting that legislated would happen. Because right before a presidential election is probably not the time you want to make any kind of major change to the election code. We’ve done it before. It’s not the best approach.”
Pennsylvania’s Election Law Advisory Board was created by the General Assembly after confusion and controversy surrounding the October 2019 passage of Pennsylvania Act 77, a voting reform package that changed a host of election rules right before the presidential election.
Act 77 created the new option to vote by mail without providing an excuse, which had been required for Pennsylvania voters using absentee ballots. It also allowed for a 50-day mail-in voting period, the longest vote-by-mail period in the country; extended the deadline to register to vote from 30 days before an election to 15 days before; and extended mail-in and absentee submission deadlines from the Friday before an election, to 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Now the board is tasked with evaluating the electoral process and making recommendations for improvements. The bipartisan board, made up mostly of county commissioners, offers opinions on election matters, or draft legislation for the general assembly to consider.
