Pennsylvania Residents Say Voter ID Law Violates Constitutional Right to the Ballot Box
Viviette Applewhite has voted in nearly every election since 1960. Under a new Pennsylvania law, she may not be able to vote in this year’s presidential election at all — and she’s now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit arguing the law that could disenfranchise her violates the state’s own constitution.
A Law With a Long List of Plaintiffs
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Advancement Project, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, and the Washington law firm Arnold & Porter, challenges Act 18 of 2012 — commonly known as the voter ID law — on behalf of ten individual plaintiffs and four organizational plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and Philadelphia’s Homeless Advocacy Project. Signed by Governor Tom Corbett in March, the law requires every voter to present an acceptable form of photo identification at the polls, replacing a previous system that only required first-time voters to show ID, and accepted a much wider range of documents, including non-photo identification like a utility bill.
The plaintiffs’ central legal argument doesn’t focus primarily on how many voters the law might affect, though that number is itself substantial — but on a more fundamental claim: that Act 18 is unconstitutional on its face, regardless of how well or poorly the state implements it. Michael Rubin, an attorney with Arnold & Porter working alongside the ACLU, laid out that argument directly in the case’s opening statement, arguing the law inherently obstructs the fundamental right to vote no matter how many accommodations the state builds around it.
Who the Law Actually Burdens
The law’s practical impact falls hardest on voters least equipped to navigate its requirements. Advocates for the plaintiffs point to elderly voters like Applewhite, women who’ve legally changed their names through marriage and now hold identification that doesn’t match their voter registration, low-income residents without a driver’s license or the underlying documents — birth certificates, Social Security cards — needed to obtain the state’s alternative ID, and voters with disabilities who face genuine physical barriers simply reaching a PennDOT office to apply. The Women’s Law Project has specifically highlighted the gendered dimension of that burden, noting that women made up close to 59 percent of Pennsylvanians over 65 in the years leading up to the law’s passage — meaning any burden falling disproportionately on elderly voters falls disproportionately on women as well.
The state has pushed back forcefully against the idea that the law would disenfranchise anyone. Attorneys representing the Commonwealth have argued Pennsylvania created a free state ID specifically for registered voters who lack other qualifying identification, and that the state has done “everything possible” to make identification widely accessible ahead of the law taking effect. Notably, the Commonwealth stipulated in court that it had no evidence of even a single documented case of voter fraud in Pennsylvania — undercutting the law’s own stated rationale, since preventing in-person voter fraud was the primary justification legislators offered when passing Act 18 in the first place.
A Case That Would Outlast a Single Election Cycle
What began as an effort to block the law before the November 2012 presidential election would stretch on far longer than either side likely anticipated. Commonwealth Court did grant a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement for the November election and the following May’s primary, but the underlying constitutional question wouldn’t be fully resolved until a permanent injunction trial the following summer. Judge Bernard McGinley ultimately ruled in January 2014 that the law violated Pennsylvania’s constitutional protection of the right to vote outright, writing bluntly that “disenfranchising voters through no fault of the voter himself is plainly unconstitutional.” Governor Corbett’s administration declined to appeal that ruling months later, formally ending the law’s nearly two-year run without it ever being enforced for a single election.
For Applewhite and the other plaintiffs who brought the case, that outcome vindicated the argument they’d made from the start: that a law framed around preventing fraud the state itself admitted it had no evidence of had instead threatened to strip the ballot box from exactly the voters — elderly, low-income, disabled — least able to absorb a new bureaucratic hurdle standing between them and a right they’d exercised without incident for decades.
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