This story is heart breaking, appalling, and just the first of many similar that we’re likely to hear as new voter suppression laws, jammed through by Republican legislatures around the country, take effect before next year’s 2012 Presidential election cycle.
Dorothy Cooper is a 96-year old African-American woman from Tennessee. Born before women even had the right to vote, she’s now been voting religiously for some 70 years without a problem, even before the Voting Rights of 1965 during the the Jim Crow-era in the South. At least until now.
The newly-elected GOP legislature in her state has rammed through a disenfranchising polling-place Photo ID restriction law which has now made it incredibly difficult for Cooper to cast her legal vote, just like some 500,000 legal and largely Democratic-leaning voters in Tennessee.
As Rachel Maddow details below, Cooper has never had a driver’s license. So, at 96 years old, she worked to make her way to the DMV in advance of next year’s election and presented her birth certificate and all sorts of other identifying documents in order to receive the supposedly “free” state ID she is legally entitled to receive under the new law so that she can once again cast a vote next year.
However, as Cooper has gotten married since birth and her name has thus changed in the bargain, she was denied the ID, as she was unable to find and produce her marriage certificate to prove that she was who she said she was.
Welcome to your 2012 elections in the “world’s greatest Democracy”…
You are absolutely right, this story is heart-breaking! What happen to democracy and everyone to have his right to vote?
Hmmm, so someone could not in all these years bother to take care of a simple task for themselves so it obviously everyone else’s fault. Not buying it at all. If someone can’t demonstrate the due diligence to complete a simple task, they have no business voting. No wonder this nation is a mess, people are too lazy, corrupt, and crying poor me.
I feel for her. Her situation is sad. But… if she cannot prove who she is, she is not entitled to the state ID card. This is not a race thing, it is not a Democrat thing. This is a simple matter of proving who you are before you can participate in any public function that requires eligibility. She would have to prove who she is to pick up a piece of Registered Mail or be a witness in court. How is this any different? The state needs to look at cases like this individually and help people find alternate methods to establish her identity.
It is possible to obtain a copy of one’s marriage license by contacting the state in which one married. There are public records, so one can definitively obtain a copy of one’s marriage license. For example, when one’s husband dies, one needs a copy of one’s marriage license to gain the social security benefits of one’s husband’s social security retirement (if the husband’s social security benefits are higher and/or the wife depended on her husband’s benefits, while he was in a nursing home facility). She needs to contact an elder advocacy group to help her.
But it sounds like a sex thing, doesn’t it? She’s denied an ID because her last name changed when she got married. And you really think if she was the sole eyewitness to a murder that the judge would say, “sorry, you didn’t bring your marriage license, so we’ll have to let the killer go free?”
Brad, give us a break.