According to a new Quinnipiac University poll, Obama leads Romney, 45 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania. But will it matter?

Check out this report from The Inquirer:

More than 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania do not have photo identification cards from the state Transportation Department, putting their voting rights at risk in the November election, according to data released Tuesday by state election officials.

The figures – representing 9.2 percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters – are significantly higher than prior estimates by the Corbett administration…. [T]he potential problem is much bigger, particularly in Philadelphia, where 186,830 registered voters – 18 percent of the city’s total registration – do not have PennDot ID. [...]

Republican lawmakers pushed the bill through the legislature in March and it was signed into law by Gov. Corbett, over protests from Democrats that the measure would disenfranchise thousands of voters, disproportionately affecting those without driver’s licenses – the poor, the elderly, and the young.

Gov. Corbett must be doing cartwheels.

The law could be in violation of the state constitution and is being challenged. A hearing will be held on July 25 and will very possibly make it to the state Supreme Court before November.

If this is how Willard M. Romney is planning on winning the presidential election, then maybe he realizes what a disastrous candidate he is after all.

Sorry to be redundant here, but the GOP plan is working: New voter registration laws could hurt President Obama. And as I have said over and over again, in many, many posts, the people suffering the worst consequences of the Voter I.D. laws are most often low income voters, the elderly, the ill who can’t leave home, young voters, minorities, and of course, anyone without transportation (or to put it another way, lean Democratic). And to those who say, “Well, there are always absentee ballots,” some states are now requiring Voter I.D. to qualify for those, too.

Voter fraud is rarer than getting struck by lightning. If Republicans are so concerned about it, despite evidence to the contrary, then take steps to provide identification at no expense, physical or monetary.

But they’re not, so they won’t.