TodayJudge considers buttons, ACORN
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Editorial
Article RatingIt’s not unusual for election-related issues to come before the courts so close to Election Day, and Commonwealth Court adjudicated two lawsuits on this topic late last week.
One case involved whether items of clothing were covered by the rules against electioneering inside a polling place. The other pitted the state Republican party against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in a dispute over fraudulent voter registrations.
In the clothing case, Judge Robert Simpson ruled that individual counties were within their rights to allow voters to wear T-shirts or buttons touting their preferred candidates into the polling place. The Department of State says 38 of 67 counties allow voters to wear campaign-related gear.
Two local elections officials had sued the Department of State over a memo it issued to elections bureaus advising them not to accost voters just for wearing campaign T-shirts or buttons.
Simpson, however, noted there was an equal protection question that the case did not explore — is it fair to allow voters to advertise candidates on their clothing while denying poll workers the same freedom of expression?
That question describes, to us anyway, a kind of slippery slope. The ban on electioneering inside the actual polling place is crucial to guaranteeing an unencumbered right to vote. People involved in the actual running of a polling place should not betray any hint that they are working for a candidate or cause when their real job is to work for an accurate count of the ballots.
Individual voters, by contrast, come and go in about 15 minutes, and they represent no one but themselves. While we would prefer that they leave the buttons in the car or keep their jackets buttoned over their candidate T-shirts, Simpson pointed out that “a court cannot mandate common sense or good taste.”
And, as Department of State chief counsel Al Masland told the Associated Press, “The most important thing is that no voter is turned away from the polls, no matter what they’re wearing,” That’s what we think, too.
In the GOP-ACORN case, which was heard separately, the judge rejected the party’s demand that ACORN turn over a list of the 140,000 voter registrations it has collected. The court also refused to order ACORN to air public service announcements reminding new voters that they must present ID with their registration when voting for the first time.
The Republican complaint was propelled by reports that some ACORN-collected registrations are fraudulent. Indeed, a man in Delaware County is facing forgery charges for having altered 18 registration forms he collected while employed by ACORN.
But after an eight-hour hearing, Simpson, who heard both election-related cases, found that the Republicans did not have the evidence to show that ACORN was itself responsible for voter-registration fraud, nor could they prove that elections officials at the county or state level were unable to deal properly with forged or fraudulent registrations.
Indeed, testimony in the case indicated that ACORN itself routinely cooperates with election officials by flagging registration forms that are incomplete or contain questionable information. It also helps authorities identify people like the Delaware County forgery defendant.
We appreciate the concern that state Republicans have for illegal acts that could undermine the ballot process. We can also see that ACORN’s mission to aid low-income people means that their voter registration drives would result in a lot more new Democratic voters than Republicans.
As it happens, the Democratic registration edge in Pennsylvania doubled in the past year from half a million to 1 million, and ACORN’s 140,000 new registrations in the state was a big portion of that.
But we would advise the state GOP that going to court isn’t going to help them erase that edge. Their efforts would be better spent on registration drives.
