The Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.Earlier this year, Pennsylvania passed a voter photo ID law. It was a rather strict law; in fact, it was one of the strictest in the country. I've talked about this before. There was a suit filed, but the law was approved by a Pennsylvania judge. Fortunately, a higher state court ordered a reconsideration in language that required that judge to enjoin the law, that is, to block its implementation, until after the election when a full hearing could be held.
But the state of Pennsylvania, in the wake of this order, failed to inform voters of the change. Officials delayed sending out corrected information. Instead of correcting its now-false ads telling people a photo ID was required to vote, the state released new and still-misleading ads, like the one shown below.
This ad - and I repeat, this was issued after the order blocking the law from going into effect - this ad features a big image of a photo ID with little type that says “This election day, if you have it,” and then in great big, huge type, the all-caps phrase “Show it.”
Voting advocacy groups went to court to ask that Pennsylvania officals be ordered to stop sending out these clearly misleading ads. On the Friday before election day, a Pennsylvania judge refused to issue that order, allowing the misleading ads to stay.The judge who did that was Commonwealth Judge Robert Simpson. This is the same judge who originally approved of this law and, as again I've told you before, after being ordered to enjoin it, went out of his way to limit the scope of that order as much as possible and specifically allowed the state of Pennsylvania to continue producing and releasing misleading ads. And then refused to tell the state of stop misleading voters.
Commonwealth Judge Robert Simpson: You are a clown.
Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/03/1133891/pennsylvania-judge-wont-ban-misleading-photo-id-ads/
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