“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” according to journalist Michael Kinsley.
A recent example from Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives:
“Voter ID…[will] allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
Preventing voter fraud has been the stated reason for requiring voters to display a government-issued ID if they want to cast a ballot on Election Day.
The fraud is on you, if you’re one of the millions of Americans who don’t have IDs – predominantly the elderly, college students, and the poor.
Voter ID laws are a cousin to voter suppression efforts.
In Maryland, we have a long history of such attempts to deny the franchise:
Voting machines didn’t work in African-American precincts in the 60’s and 70’s.
More recently, flyers urged people to vote on the wrong date and implied that you couldn’t vote if you owed rent or child support.
That’s why the General Assembly adopted legislation introduced by Senator Lisa Gladden and me to make it a crime to “influence or attempt to influence a voter’s decision whether to go to the polls to cast a vote through the use of force, fraud, threat, menace, intimidation, bribery, reward, or offer of reward.”
This is the law that both Paul Schurick and Julius Henson violated with their Election Day 2010 robocalls that urged voters to “relax,” implying that Governor O’Malley had been successful and there was no need to vote.
Some have said that this statute violates the First Amendment.
However, there are precedents for such a limit on political speech. Statements known by the speaker to be false are afforded a lower level of First Amendment protection and securing the right to vote freely and effectively is a compelling governmental interest.
Maryland has taken appropriate and constitutional steps to prevent the diminution of our powerful and fundamental right of American citizenship – the right to vote.
