When I went to vote last week, the person working behind the table asked if I was voting Republican. I said no, I wouldn’t ever vote for the party that was trying to keep people from voting. While I was in the booth, I heard some of the workers discussing what I said. One of them said, “You have to have something with these people, they all look alike. They could vote six, seven times and you wouldn’t be able to tell.” (I wish she’d said it to my face, so I could have confronted her. Not that it would have done any good…)
But yes, the right white has done a very good job of making voter ID seem “reasonable” to people who now believe the danger to voter integrity comes from brown people voting multiple times, and not from election officials who suddenly find additional votes out of thin air, or angry mobs that storm an election office and demand they stop counting ballots.
Hopefully, the case of Viviette Applewhite will get through to at least some of those idiots:
The first time Viviette Applewhite went to the polls, she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy. But this year, a strict new voter identification law will likely prevent the now-93-year old woman and many others in Pennsylvania from participating in their country’s democratic process. And Applewhite won’t stand for it.
She will be the plaintiff in the voter identification lawsuit being filed by the ACLU and the NAACP in the state, which claims that “the state’s voter photo ID law violates the Pennsylvania Constitution by depriving citizens of their most fundamental constitutional right – the right to vote.”
Applewhite no longer has a copy of her birth certificate, and she does not have a drivers’ license. Without either of these things, the new Pennsylvania restrictions say that she is ineligible to vote.
But her circumstances are not at all uncommon. African Americans, especially elderly African Americans, are disproportionately less likely to have a birth certificate.
Isn’t that the point?
According to the Brennan Center for Justice:
Twenty-five percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to eight percent of white voting-age citizens.
Harsh voter ID laws, which former President Bill Clinton characterized as the most serious threat of disenfranchisement since Jim Crow laws, have been passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.
And 24 other states are trying to pass them now.
Susie, do voters have to sign in –here in NJ it’s a big registration book, with spaces for signing in, on the same line as previous signatures, iirc.
(I remember noting that my signature changed after I’d been diagnosed with cancer: For some reason I couldn’t get my muscles to remember how to form the final letters of my last name. I sat at my desk trying to sign my name over and over and my hand just wouldn’t cooperate. And when it was fluid again, it was slightly different. Weird.
There’s a photocopy of my signature from when I registered lo those many years ago for the people manning the registers to compare the my signatue to — and most of my letters were very much the same, just the last two letters had changed a bit. Just because I couldn’t get my muscles to cooperate for awhile.)
I can’t believe people could say something like that if a signature is required. But, also, with photo ID’s changes in hair styles and coloring, loss of weight, etc., can make someone look somewhat different. That’ll really freak them out. And not everyone is all that good at recognizing faces that perfectly — should get interesting.
“Land of the free and home of the brave,” where only the right kind of people should be allowed to vote. So sayest the 1% and their Republican minions.
This story is so perverted and made up, it doesn’t pass the smell test. Rancid garlic balony to be specific.