This week in the War on Voting: Three court decisions on voting'good, half-good, and hmmmmph

Pennsylvania's voter ID law has been upheld by a commonwealth judge and has been appealed to the commonwealth's supreme court. [See Adam B's analysis here.] It is unlikely to be overturned by the high court.

Will it make a difference about who gets Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes? Right now, a poll by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall shows President Obama holding a 6-point lead. That's in line with previous polls by various organizations in the past couple of months. But will the voter ID law have a negative impact on turnout of Democratic voters as critics of the law have claimed?

"The reality is it [voter ID] will not have much effect'if anything it will boomerang" against the Republicans, agreed Larry Ceisler, the veteran Philadelphia-based political analyst. He speculated that it might affect some local races, which could be decided by a handful of votes.

Perhaps. But, as David Dayen points out, this is all about shaving votes off the margins when one or two percent points could make a difference, not just in local races but all the way to the top of the ticket.

The New York Times editorial board has weighed in on the decision:

There is no evidence that Judge Simpson contorted law and precedent to reach his conclusion. He even described Mr. Turzai's comment as 'disturbing' and 'tendentious.' But his ruling, in a case brought by potentially disenfranchised voters, is a clear and disturbing illustration of the way Republicans have manipulated legislation for their own ends, placing a veneer of civic responsibility on a low-minded and sleazy political ploy.

The real reasons for voter ID laws are quite clear. The desire to dampen the Democratic vote after 2006'and particularly in the wake of President Obama's election'prompted six states to decide, virtually simultaneously, to pass voter ID laws.

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Lindsey Ruta and Annelise Russell have written an excellent analysis for NBC's Open Channel regarding the impact of photo ID laws on the Latino vote in Texas and other states with large Latino populations. Latinos have comparatively low voter participation rate. Although 600,000 of them become eligible to cast ballots every year, only about 30 percent of them actually do so. That could change, and in eight states, Latinos could come to dominate the political scene over the next one to three decades, depending on which state is being considered.

Expectations among groups such as the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials are that the Latino vote percentage this year will be a good deal higher than in 2008. Given the distaste with which the majority of Latinos have for the Republican Party, it is no surprise that suppressing their votes is part of a GOP-led campaign.

In Texas, Republicans have passed legislation requiring a government ID card to vote and has made it more difficult for people to acquire such cards. The argument for doing so, as is the case elsewhere, is to prevent voter fraud. But, Ruta and Russell write that of the 100 cases Texas says it has investigated in the past decade, only 10 have led to convictions, and only one of those was for voter impersonation at the polls where a photo ID might have made a difference.

The state has 13 million voters, so the ID requirement is clearly a solution in search of a problem, as one legislator put it. Implementation of the law is pending a federal district court ruling. Estimates of how many voters lack the required ID in Texas range from the state's claim of 167,724 to the 1.5 million claimed by the U.S. Justice Department.

The low level of fraud is also the case in other states with large Latino populations whether they require photo IDs or not. In Colorado, for instance, a non-photo ID is required. There have been 21 convictions for voter fraud since 2000, only three for impersonating a voter. It is unclear from the data available whether these three were in person or by mail. Colorado legislators have considered but not passed photo ID laws in each of the past eight years.

In New Mexico, the state which has the highest concentration of Latino voters at 38 percent, there is no photo ID requirement. The state attorney general's office says there has never been a conviction for voter fraud. The legislature has rejected proposed photo ID laws there in each of the past four years.

(Continue reading about the war on voting below the fold.)