By Randy LoBasso

– Almost two years ago, the Pennsylvania state Legislature passed a party-lined bill which created a Voter ID requirement during Pennsylvania elections. This morning, a judge ruled that law is illegal.

The ruling is neither the first nor the last, and sets the stage for perhaps a final fight in the seemingly never-ending saga.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal,” Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley wrote in his 103-page decision.

McGinley’s ruling comes both before the state has had the chance to see the strict law in action (it had been on hold through the 2012 and 2013 elections) and after the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling, which struck down the part of the 1965 law which was keeping several southern states from enforcing their Voter ID laws.

The ruling is “as wonderful a present as I could have imagined,” Vic Walczak of the ACLU of Pennsylvania said on a conference call with reporters Friday morning. Today is his birthday.

What McGinley consistently found is if the law were put into effect, there would be hundreds of thousands of voters without compliant ID due to the difficulty of obtaining one.

Additionally, the Commonwealth was unable to find a single instance of the sort of voter fraud that Republican legislators claimed was happening without Voter ID in place. “When you look at it that way, the only crime that is being perpetrated on the people of Pennsylvania is by the people who support this Voter ID law,” added Walczak.

Pennsylvania Democrats from near and far have hailed the decision as a victory.

“The Corbett Administration has been defending a flawed and punitive law that restricts access to the polls. It is designed to suppress votes. We have already wasted millions of tax dollars on this law, including $1 million for a misleading ad campaign. These are funds that could have been used to educate our children and create jobs,” said State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-Phila).

Democratic chairman Jim Burns said the decision is “a big step forward for making sure our elections are fair and a testament to the thousands of Pennsylvanians who worked hard to make sure everyone’s vote would be counted.”

But is that all she wrote? She will continue to write. Both sides of the trial McGinley oversaw last year, which lasted 12 days, vowed an appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and that will happen—even though those on the ACLU’s press call earlier today essentially deemed a waste of taxpayer funds.

“The Commonwealth has already spent millions of dollars on what the court today called a misinformation campaign, and legal expenses for this case,” said Ben Geffen, of the Public Interest Law Center. “If the Commonwealth has a surplus of funds available, perhaps they can devote it to voter registration efforts or to better funding of public schools instead of continuing to litigate against voters’ rights to participate in elections.”

Source: http://blogs.philadelphiaweekly.com/phillynow/2014/01/17/pa-voter-id-law-struck-down-now-what/