Oops! Pennsylvania GOP state House leader boasts on videotape voter-ID laws changed to beat Obama

June 26, 2012—

“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation–abortion facility regulations–in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” That was the boast of Pennsylvania GOP House majority leader Mike Turzai at a Republican State Committee meeting in Hershey, Saturday evening.

Pennsylvania Democrats criticized Turzai’s boast made while among a supposedly safe partisan audience and posted a video of his quoted comments as the real reason for passage of the new law in March, keeping in step with a number of other states requiring government issued photo-IDs, particular those with Republican governors. A spokesperson for Turzai, Steve Mishkin, made a statement that fraud does exist and the idea is to stop it before it happens.

However, PA state Senator Daylin Leach (D) appearing in an interview on MSNBC, commented that the only thing photo-identification would curb is voter impersonation, of which there only 3 cases have been documented and verified nationally in the last decade. None of those occurred in the commonwealth state of Pennsylvania. Leach said that the state’s Democratic Party has a strong ground game to attempt to counter suppression effects if legal efforts to challenge the law fall short.

Despite lame excuses given when challenged with allegations of voter suppression intents, GOP supporters come up with example-after-example of things that now require a photo-ID attempting to side-step the charge in the absence of any substantial voter fraud. Mike Turzai himself did that in a YouTube video when the law was being passed. If new state voting requirements prevent as much as 10 percent of currently eligible voters nationwide from exercising their right to vote, that’s enough to swing the election in one candidate’s favor over another. A paltry 532 votes made the difference in the 2000 presidential election’s “hanging chad” recount debacle in Florida.

Sources, resources and references: MSNBC PoliticsNation, with Al Sharpton,

http://leanforward.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/26/12423904-pennsylvania-state-senator-voter-id-law-is-about-suppressing-votes?lite (includes Turzai video from 6/23/2012)

http://www.senatorleach.com/media/press/2012/Mar7.htm

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/state/turzais-voter-id-remark-draws-criticism-641982/

http://www.politicspa.com/turzai-voter-id-law-means-romney-can-win-pa/37153/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/mike-turzai-voter-id_n_1625646.html

http://youtu.be/U2-dI3CEIt8