A Pennsylvania election official has announced that he will not enforce his state's new voter ID laws. Christopher Broach, a Democrat who oversees elections in Delaware County, appeared on Monday's PoliticsNation to talk about his stand.
"This goes to my core beliefs and values, that if a government can ask citizens to violate a law, which is the Civil Rights Act, in order to enforce a law, then that law is no good," Broach told PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton.
Broach's decision may be punishable with either fines or jail time, but he told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week that he was willing to take that risk. "Rosa Parks made the same decision," he said.
Republicans in states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia have been passing voter ID laws that could end up disenfranchising thousands of Americans and possibly even swing the election. In Philadelphia, some estimate that as many as 43 percent of voters lack the identification these laws require voters to display. However, the kind of fraud that these laws are ostensibly designed to prevent is 1/3,615 as common as UFO sightings.
"We have some real attempts to undermine, in my opinion, the democratic rights of all voters—White, black Asian, Latino—in those states, and I think it has to be resisted," said Sharpton.