Pa. House advances voter ID, omnibus election reform bills

This story originally appeared on WITF.

A handful of Democrats in the Pennsylvania House joined Republicans Tuesday to advance voter ID legislation, a longstanding priority for Republicans who say voter confidence will grow with tough identification requirements at the polls.

In a 14-12 vote, with support from two Democrats and all 12 Republicans, the House State Government Committee advanced HB771. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Thomas Mehaffie, R-Dauphin County, said it would expand on the voter ID requirements already in place in Pennsylvania for voters who cast their ballot at a precinct for the first time. He also said it would survive legal challenges, unlike a previous law that state courts overturned in 2014 for violating the state constitution as an undue burden preventing access to the ballot.

Mehaffie’s bill would create a “non-strict” voter ID requirement, meaning that if people do not have the proper identification, they can still vote if they sign an affidavit that they are who they claim to be or a third-party vouches for that person, with criminal penalties for anyone who provides false information.

That was not good enough for a majority of the Democrats on the committee. Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia, said the bill is a solution in search of a problem, and doesn’t address real concerns about double-voting or the verifiability of some voter registration forms. He questioned statements from Republicans that expanded voter ID requirements would increase trust in the elections process.

“ The conversation around voter ID as a cure-all for the safety and security of our election system is driven out of a bunch of malicious lies about the election system,” Kenyatta said during committee discussion on the bill. “ If you want people to have faith in the election system, a lot of people who told those disprovable lies should say, ‘Sorry, I lied to you.’”

After the 2020 election, numerous elected Republicans and rank-and-file GOP voters embraced conspiracy theories that cast doubt on Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

Mehaffie was joined by 10 other Republicans, and two Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Frank Burns of Cambria and Ed Neilson of Philadelphia, in offering the bill. Similar legislation passed the House at the end of the last legislative session as an amendment, but it was too late for the Senate to take the bill up.

Broader reform bill

Immediately after advancing the voter ID bill, the committee passed an omnibus election reform bill sponsored by the Legislature’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Joanna McClinton of Philadelphia.

The bill includes a suite of reforms, from allowing counties to process mail-in ballot return envelopes before Election Day (called precanvassing) to expanding the use of electronic poll books during voter check-in at the polls. It would further codify early voting, update rules for mail-in voting, change post-election audits to a more mathematically robust model, and increase the barriers to making spurious claims of election fraud.

The bill, HB1396, does not include a voter ID provision; it advanced on a 14-12 party line vote.

Democrats took turns praising the bill and McClinton for introducing it. Kenyatta, who voted against voter ID, said the omnibus bill would make it easier for people to vote.

“ It’s a bill that actually solves some of the issues of voter fraud as well as solve some of the issues of voter access,” he said. “This is the sweet spot in terms of what we should be advancing.”

Rep. Brad Roae, R-Crawford and the minority leader of the committee, said he was concerned with the potential cost of the bill, especially to counties, and the process by which it was introduced.

“ This 98-page bill was called up for a vote 20 hours and nine minutes after it was introduced,” Roae said. “That’s just not adequate time to read and understand and get feedback from our county election boards.”

Roae said he is concerned about the cost of new equipment, including electronic poll books, of higher pay for poll workers and increased staff costs to cover early voting requirements, and of ballot drop boxes, with a minimum required of two per county (and more for counties with a population over 100,000).

Possible vote next week

The next step is for each bill to be called up for second consideration on the House floor. If one or both passes, it would be sent to the Appropriations Committee for an estimate of cost before returning to the floor for a third vote, which would send the bill to the Senate.

A spokesperson for House leadership said both bills are tentatively scheduled to run next week.

Election bills in the Senate are normally referred to the Senate State Government Committee, which is run by Sen. Cris Dush, R-Centre County. His office did not provide a statement on the prospects of either bill in his committee.

Dush has previously expressed interest in a voter ID bill, though he did not say which aspects of that bill he would favor.

“ My highest hope would be that we actually get voter ID fixed so that the court will allow it to progress,” Dush told WITF in a January interview about election reforms.

House Democrats have been projecting for months that movement on voter ID would need to come with other changes in order to be politically palatable.

At the start of the legislative session in January, House Majority Leader Matthew Bradford, D-Montgomery County, said his party would welcome election reforms, including voter ID.

“We would love to see some of those move as a larger package,” he said, also indicating support from Gov. Josh Shapiro for an update to election laws. “We’re not saying no to any of that. In fact, we’re more than open to it.”

In March, McClinton said she would consider a voter ID bill that did not disenfranchise anybody, that she was interested in other reforms like early voting, but that it was too early to say how these interests would both move forward with a chance to pass both chambers.