I’d say Republicans should be ashamed of themselves, but I don’t know that they have that capacity:
Swept up in the craze of preventing widespread voter fraud thatdoesn’t actually exist, Tennessee Republicans passed a voter identification law this year that they claimed would put an end to fraud and ensure fair elections. Like similar laws in other states, Tennessee’s version has come under scrutiny from voting rights advocates, civil rights groups like the NAACP and ACLU, and even Democratic senators, who oppose the laws because they will disenfranchise poor, elderly, and minority voters who are less likely to have photo IDs.
The state now has evidence that that will be the case. Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old Chattanooga resident who says she has voted in every election but one since she became eligible to vote, wanted to ensure she’d have the necessary ID to vote in next year’s elections, when Tennessee’s law goes into effect. But when she went to apply for the ID, she was denied, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports:
That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.
“But I didn’t have my marriage certificate,” Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.
“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Cooper said.
Another reason to keep one’s maiden name when getting married!
Friends of mine (and loads of people at the Div of Motor Vehicles office I went to) got the same Gotcha surprise: Women who had married and taken their husband’s name were denied the new Federally mandated super secure driver’s license.
My elderly neighbor, nearing 80, widowed for a almost 3 decades, had to track down her marriage certificate to renew her driver’s license. It involved searching for any living and findable officials from the synagogue where she got married. It was exahusting and made her very nervous.
Thank goodness she didn’t need it to vote!
Cool. Disenfranchise some two thirds of women in one go. Whee.
The chickens will come home to roost if the Justsice Department turns a blind eye to these cases. But, then again Obama knows he can’t win the South in ’12 (so why bother ?)
Interestingly, it was actually easier for her to vote, to register to vote, during Jim Crow… than now.