Witnesses at a hearing Tuesday on Pennsylvania's voter-identification law painted a bleak landscape of voters confused by the new photo requirement, PennDOT officials dispensing misinformation and conflicting estimates of how many voters lack valid IDs.
"The information is just not getting out quick enough" to ensure that voters know about the law and understand how to comply, testified John Jordan, director of civic engagement for the NAACP. "There's no way that this can be done" by the Nov. 6 election, he said.
Jordan's group is among the plaintiffs in a Commonwealth Court lawsuit seeking to prevent the law from taking effect as the first step toward a broader challenge of its constitutionality.
The hearing is expected to stretch into a sixth day of testimony on Wednesday, and closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday. Judge Robert Simpson, a Republican, has said he hopes to issue a ruling during the week of Aug. 13.
The law, which the Republican-controlled Legislature approved earlier this year without any Democratic votes, requires every voter to show a valid photo ID. It is one of the nation's strictest ID laws. It represents a significant change from current law, which requires only people voting in a polling place for the first time to show identification, including non-photo documents such as a utility bill or bank statement.
The law has provoked a fierce debate over voting rights as Pennsylvania is poised to play a potentially crucial role in the presidential election. Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to erect barriers to voting in an effort to gain an advantage for GOP nominee-apparent Mitt Romney in a state Democratic incumbent Barack Obama carried in 2008.
Secretary of State Carol Aichele, the state's top elections official, was the leadoff witness at Tuesday's court session.
Aichele defended her department's efforts to make PennDOT IDs — a driver's license or a non-driver photo card — the standard for complying with the new law, although a lawyer for the plaintiffs said other forms of ID also are valid and easier to obtain for many voters.
Washington lawyer David Gersch cited resident IDs issued by Pennsylvania care facilities and student IDs issued by universities as examples of cards that require less rigorous documentation than the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation IDs, which require a Social Security card and, in many cases, a birth certificate.
"That's the problem with the law," Gersch said.
Aichele said 91 percent of the state's 8.3 million voters already have valid IDs and that the PennDOT cards — free to voters who lack other acceptable IDs — are the "most useful" form of photo ID.
The plaintiffs contend that at least 1 million voters do not have valid IDs, but Aichele said state officials believe the number is "substantially less" than the 759,000 voters whose names were not found in a comparison with a PennDOT database.
"We don't know," she said.
Several witnesses testified that they recently visited local PennDOT offices as part of a project organized by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a progressive think tank in Harrisburg, to find out how well prepared they were to help voters seeking ID cards.
Steve Jarrell of Chambersburg said he waited in line for 45 minutes to talk to an employee, only to be told erroneously that he would have to pay $13.50 for a voting ID. He said there were almost no signs or literature about the new law.
Janice Horn, a retired librarian from Clarion, said she encountered a woman who said she could not verbally provide information about the law because she was a PennDOT contractor, but she did give Horn a handout about the law.
Jordan said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has held clinics on the law in an attempt to educate voters, but that repeated changes in the process for obtaining IDs — designed, ironically, to make the process easier for voters — have only compounded the confusion.
The time spent dealing with the fallout from the law has reduced the NAACP's ability to register new voters this year, he said.
"We feel like this is an extra burden that's been put upon us," he said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.