Over almost the last 2 years I’ve written several times about the Pennsylvania voter identification law. The law was passed in March 2012 several weeks before the primary election. It seemed to me that the purpose of the law was voter suppression in the hopes of allowing more Republican candidates to triumph as the polls and most importantly to allow the Republicans to carry the state during the 2012 Presidential election.

Critics challenged the law and it was temporarily blocked while the validity of the law was being contested in court. Now the law has been struck down. Here is a quote from that article on the ruling:

In his 103-page ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard L. McGinley concluded that the 2012 law placed an unreasonable burden on the fundamental right to vote and created insurmountable obstacles for hundreds of thousands of people, many of them elderly and disabled.

Supporters claimed this law was needed to fight voter impersonation fraud, but could not find any examples of this type of fraud occurring in the state. Ironically, by making voting in person more difficult it would probably increase absentee voting which is a much more common source of voting fraud.

Of course the state has already spent millions on defending the law and miseducating the public on voter ID requirements and they may decide to appeal this ruling to the state Supreme Court. The governor says he has to cut funding to vluable services because of the budget shortfall. Yet he has already wasted millions on the politically motivated and apparently unconstitutional law and may decide to waste more money on this fight.