State ads tie voter ID to suffrage movement

The biggest story in Pa politics these days has to be the new voter ID law and whether, as Mike Turzai has signaled, it will deliver Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes to Mitt Romney, or is an effort to ensure voting is free of fraud, as Republicans have usually argued in approving their bill.

The ACLU and other groups have sued to block the law, saying it will deny residents without accepted photo ID their constitutionally-protected right to vote. Meanwhile the state announced last week that about 10 percent of registered voters -- many of them in Philadelphia -- do not have driver's licences, which along with government/university/senior center IDs are the main form of acceptable identification under the new law.

Meanwhile Democrats and union allies worried about the law's impacts still don't have a list of voters without ID -- it's difficult to create without help from PennDOT -- and are really worried about the impacts this fall, the liberal site TPM writes.

The state has also had trouble updating the new rules on the website for the Dept. of State (which oversees elections), still listing old rules for ID at Pa polls, the AP reports.

Enter the Corbett administration. The Philadelphia City Paper reports the governor's office has hired a PR firm headed by a Republican fundraiser to produce spots educating voters on the new rules, which pitch the law as a voters-rights measure.

"Your right to vote. It's one thing you never want to miss out on," says one spot from the firm's video channel (since pulled), over black & white photos of the women's suffrage movement.

The P-G's Kaitlynn Riely reports that Allegheny County GOP chief Jim Roddey joked about the bill during a Romney campaign counter-rally to President Obama's Pgh visit on Monday: