ELEPHANT CORNER: In Defense Of Voter IDs

Monday night PhillyROC (Philadelphia Republicans of Color) met at the Wharton Center in North Philadelphia. LEWIS HARRIS, the chairman of the group, led a conversation about developing literature to support and promote the Republican Party to African Americans and other minorities. Attendees included WARD LEADERS ANNIE HAVEY, VICKIE FREEMAN and MATT WOLFE as well as the Chairperson of the 13th Ward LINDA DIGGS and other activists ERIC QUICK and CARL SPENCE.

PHILLY roll call at Republican State Committeee meeting in Harrisburg included Dan Day, Andew Gourlay, Nick Callais, Thermon Spence, Anne Havey, Norma McNeil and Joe DeFelice.

Tuesday there were dueling Governors’ meetings at the Union League. Former GOV. ED RENDELL had a reception on the first floor highlighting his new book A Nation of Wusses: How American’s Leaders Lost the Guts to Make Us Great. Immediately above him on the second floor, Wisconsin GOV. SCOTT WALKER was speaking at for a fundraiser for the Romney campaign. Walker discussed his campaign to remain Governor during his June recall vote. He captured 53% of the vote in the recall, which was a wider margin than he had won by in the general election. He believes if the recall had been held last year, before the effect of his policies could be seen, he may not have survived the recall. He and the state’s Republican-led legislature passed laws that limited the collective-bargaining abilities of most public-sector unions to salary issues (not benefits) and increased the contributions of public-sector workers to their pension and benefit plans. Although these policies appalled many unions and union supporters, the cost savings improved the finances of the state and Wisconsin municipalities and helped avoid layoffs.

Walker made it clear while he plans to help Romney as best he can, he has no interest in being Vice President. Walker stated he put in too much effort to remain the Governor of Wisconsin. He did give a plug for a fellow Wisconsinite, CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN, for the vice presidential slot. He also answered questions from the audience of which the last related to voter fraud. He was asked for advice, as this elephant believes we have voter fraud in Philadelphia. The problem in Milwaukee is similar if not worse, as Wisconsin has day-of-election registration. Walker believes voter ID will help erase some but not all of the fraud. The situation was so bad in Milwaukee that it warranted a whole chapter in John Fund’s Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Much of this chapter was based on a 2008 report by the Milwaukee Police Dept. that included page after page of election irregularities including inaccurate and fraudulent registrations that were added to the voter rolls.

Last week the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania stated over 9% of registered voters in Pennsylvania were not in the PennDOT system, including 180,000 in Philadelphia. Immediately Democrats claimed this is why we should not have voter ID. Of course, they are ignoring the fact there are other valid forms of ID such as passports, government-employee IDs and student IDs. Please note we have a large number of university students in the city who are registered to vote here but hail from other states and have driver’s licenses from those states. (Of course those are their legal licenses, not the ones they use to get drinks.) Also, we do live in city with fairly good public transportation, which should mean many people do not drive.

What the Democrats did not mention was the flip side of the argument. Maybe the problem is not with registered voters not being in the PennDOT system. Maybe the problem is with the voter rolls. As noted above, fraudulent voter registrations were rampant in Milwaukee. In one recorded instance, over 5,000 students were registered as living in a Marquette University dorm that could only house 2,600 students. Fraudulence is not the only problem with the voter rolls. The nonpartisan Pew Center for the States published a report that stated that one in eight voter registrations nationwide are bad. The study noted that 2.75 million people were registered in more than one state, roughly 2 million dead people remain on the roles and over another 12 million registrations included inaccurate information.

If you have read this column before, you may recall the issue of JOE CHEESEBORO and JOE CHEESEBOROUGH, both of whom are registered in Philadelphia to vote – one at an address on a street that no longer exits and the other at a store where no one heard of him. I am sure these errors jumped of the page because of the unusual names to JOE DeFELICE, Philadelphia director of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, who identified the problems. What would we find if we took a deeper dive?

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