HARRISBURG — No matter what people say about Pennsylvania’s new photo ID requirement for voting, the debate is clearly filling the summertime void in this high-stakes election year.

Four months before the new mandate takes effect on Election Day, Nov. 6, voting rights advocates were sounding the alarm and demanding that Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and the Legislature postpone it so that the state’s 8.2 million voters can be more thoroughly educated about the change.

At least two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law are pending in state Commonwealth Court

– one filed by a legal team that includes the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, the other by the Allegheny County Board of Elections. A trial on the ACLU suit is scheduled to start July 25.

Voters themselves, meanwhile, apparently love the statute, one of the nation’s most stringent voter ID laws. A Quinnipiac University poll released in June showed voters supported the law by a 2-1 margin.

Republicans, whose majorities in the House and Senate crafted and passed the law without a single Democratic vote, seem eager to see the effects of the new requirement.

While GOP leaders generally hew to the party line that the law is a common-sense precaution against election fraud, state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai recently gained notoriety when he boasted at a party event that it would allow Republican nominee-apparent Mitt Romney to carry Pennsylvania in the presidential election.

Democrats contend that the law is a thinly disguised effort to suppress the vote for President Barack Obama. They predict that it will disenfranchise many poor people, senior citizens and minorities, who are less than likely to have the photo IDs that all voters will have to show in order for their ballots to count.

Democrats suggest that Turzai, R-Allegheny, implied as much in his comment during last month’s meeting of the Republican State Committee and credited the remark for a recent spike in campaign fundraising and at least a doubling in the pace of volunteer recruitment.

“I think that was probably what a lot of people were thinking, but to have an elected official of his stature to come out and say that really lit a fire under our base,” said party spokesman Mark Nicastre.

Many of the volunteers have specifically asked how they can help voters comply with the law, he said.

“Why are they (Democrats) fighting a measure that only fights fraud and corruption?” grumbled Turzai spokesman Steve Miskin, who maintains that his boss’ comment was taken out of context.

Ground zero in the photo ID debate is the State Department, the Corbett administration agency in charge of overseeing Pennsylvania’s county-run elections, which seems under siege these days as it shoulders responsibility for educating voters about the new law and tweaking policies in an attempt to make it more user-friendly.

For example, changes by the department made it easier for voters without other forms of photo ID to qualify for a free non-driver photo ID card through PennDOT. They can have their birth records certified by state agencies – instead of having to pay $10 for a duplicate of their birth certificate – or in most cases they can verify their identity with a long-expired driver’s license or non-driver ID.

But the department, which originally estimated only 1 percent of Pennsylvania voters lacked a driver’s license or other acceptable ID, set off a small bombshell around the July 4 holiday by announcing a database comparison showing that more than 758,000 voters, or nearly 8 percent, lacked any PennDOT-issued ID. That prompted an outcry from critics of the law and their calls for the law to be postponed.

Corbett shrugged off the development at a news conference last week, asserting that the earlier estimates of how many voters lacked valid IDs were “all guesses as to what it might be.” He said the latest figure might be inflated by voters who have moved or died but whose names remain on the voter rolls.

“How many people really don’t have some form of ID, photo ID, in this day and age?” Corbett asked rhetorically.

The general election will provide some clues.