Stateside With Rosalea: Pennsylvania

The second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution was Pennsylvania. It originated as a proprietary colony, the land being given to offset one of King Charles II debts to Admiral Penn. Penn’s son, William, established the colony with a strong bias towards religious freedom, and it was settled in large part by Quakers escaping religious persecution in Britain.

The modern (1968) Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania lists religious freedom as no. 3 in its Declaration of Rights, after the inherent rights of mankind to be free and equal, and the people’s “inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may think proper.”

I have to admit that the fourth section of Article 1 bewilders me somewhat: Religion: “No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.” Does that mean atheists are excluded from office?

But the section of Article 1 of its Constitution that I think Pennsylvania has most egregiously failed to uphold of late is the fifth one: Elections: “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” That is, the right to vote. And since voting is an expression of choice, then anything done to limit that choice is, surely, unconstitutional.

Enter Bonusgate, the name given to a scandal resulting from Grand Jury testimony that elected officials in Pennsylvania had been spending taxpayer money making sure that only candidates they wanted to be elected would be. Some of the testimony revealed that state employees were spending their time “winnowing... the election day field” in both 2004 and 2006.

They did that by challenging the signatures collected by Independent Presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2004 and Green U.S. Senate candidate Carl Romanelli in 2006—signatures that were necessary for them to qualify to be on the ballot in that state. In an op-ed in last Wednesday’s Philadelphia Enquirer, Nader explains that those successful bonus-paid-for challenges to the signatures on the nominating petitions came with a heavy price for both himself and Romanelli--$80,000 each in litigation costs. Both petition challenges are now under investigation by the state’s Attorney-General, Tom Corbett.

In July 2008, a Republican state senator, Mike Folmer, introduced a bill aimed at leveling the playing field for independent and minor party candidates. In his press release, Folmer writes that: “Currently, Pennsylvania law uses a complex formula to produce an extraordinarily high number of petition signatures that non-major party candidates must obtain in order to appear on the ballot in a general election. In 2006, that formula resulted in minor party and independent candidates having to gather nearly 68,000 petition signatures to run in the General Election for Governor or U.S. Senator. Major party candidates, meanwhile, were required to gather only 2,000 signatures during the primary election to run for those same offices.”

So, if a candidate can’t get on the ballot, then voters don’t have the choice of voting for them. However, Pennsylvania does allow write-ins for President. But that doesn’t mean your vote for a write-in gets tallied. In the 2008 presidential election, for whatever reason, the Greens were too late to get their candidate on the ballot so McKinney became an official write-in choice instead. Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party was in the same boat.

According to Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News, “Pennsylvania arbitrarily tallied write-ins for Baldwin but not for McKinney, even though McKinney had filed a list of presidential elector candidates and had asked Pennsylvania for a tally.” The effect of this is that the Federal Elections Commission official election results shows write-in votes for Baldwin but no votes for McKinney. Winger writes that Pennsylvania will probably be sued over this some time in February.

On a weekend when the U.S. is crowing about having brought democratic elections to provincial Iraq, it might behoove it to look at it’s own “democratic” practices.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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