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Also in Fall 2012
- In Their Own Words
- Voter Harassment, Circa 2012
- Working Together -- Election 2012: The Choice is Clear for American Workers
- Why I'm an Activist
- What happens if GOP's voter suppression works?
- More Wins for Workers
- CWAers Running for Office
- Get Money Out of Politics
- Protect Collective Bargaining
- Voter Suppression Threatens To Turn Back The Clock
- Without Unions, Middle Class Families Are Worse Off: Here's Proof
- Presidential Candidates on the Issues
CWA, Allies to Register 25,000 New Pennsylvania Voters
CWA activists rally outside a
Pennsylvania Supreme Court hearing
on the controversial voter ID law.
Earl Patrick
Earl Patrick's Story:
I’m working as a volunteer for Obama, doing phone banking and voter registration. At one point, I was waiting out what the courts would decide on Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, but my colleagues on the Obama campaign insisted I go down and get one just in case. It would be bad to be registering people to vote and I couldn’t vote myself!
I’m 75 years old, and I’ve been registered for 50 years or more. But I don’t drive. So I was caught in that dilemma where I didn’t have what they call a verified voter ID. So I took public transit down to the motor vehicle office. It was wall-to-wall people. I got there at 10:30 am. And it was wall-to-wall people when I left three hours later.
I was active in The Newspaper Guild for 20 years, pretty militant. Before that I was an Air Force commander, stationed in Georgia, Mississippi and Texas in the ‘50s. The rhetoric from Romney and the Tea Party – these things scare me.
Voter ID, in my mind, is contradictory in terms of citizenship. You can have a driver’s license and you don’t have to be a citizen. It discriminates against a lot of people. This is what people in the movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s fought against. No question about it.
I was out one weekend canvassing a neighborhood in South Philadelphia. I walked into a couple of halfway houses – all men. And some of them didn’t have Social Security cards, but were registered. That’s a problem. A Social Security card is the No. 1 requirement when you go down to get your ID.
I’m retired. But if I had a job, given the circumstances, I would have had to take a vacation day to go down and register. That’s a handicap for some folks. Some people don’t even get vacation days.
I’m lucky I’m in good shape, but some elderly folks aren’t able to get out and about on public transit. It’s not that easy. The mayor just shot down a plan to issue photo ID cards through nursing homes, saying the city doesn’t have the resources. A lot of blacks migrated here in the ‘40s during the Great Migration. With so many birth certificates misplaced, that’s another problem.
They want to limit people voting, that’s my opinion. So I’m doing what I can.
CWA partnered with the Pennsylvania NAACP, Transport Workers Union and Amalgamated Transit Union to register 25,000 new voters in the Keystone State.
Activists took to the streets of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with voter registration forms and information about the state’s tough new voter identification law, recently passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature, which is designed to squelch voter turnout – particularly among seniors, minorities, students and low-income residents.
“Together, we worked day and night in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to register new voters and educate current voters about what they now need to do to participate in the democratic process,” said CWA District 2-13 Vice President Ed Mooney. “Some in the State Legislature may think they can keep eligible voters away from the polls with unnecessary hurdles, but they need to think again.”
In early October, the state’s Commonwealth Court will determine whether the law disenfranchises voters. Proponents of the law claim it’s intended to prevent voter fraud, but since 2000, only 10 cases of in-person voter fraud have been proven nationally.
And reports already show that nearly 750,000 Pennsylvanians do not have an acceptable ID to vote.
But that doesn’t seem to bother Republican state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who sponsored the law.
“As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need,” he said. “If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.”
Meanwhile, thousands of “lazy” Pennsylvanians have spent hours upon hours navigating crowded DMVs and Social Security offices to get IDs so they can cast a ballot.