Last month, Dorothy Cooper, a 96 year-old African-American woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, went to the ballot box to vote. Dorothy was born before women had the right to vote and when Jim Crow laws kept most African-Americans disenfranchised. Despite this, Dorothy has not missed a single election since 1960. Like many seniors, Dorothy has a Social Security card, a local photo ID issued by the Chatanooga Police Department--and a voter registration card.
Dorothy also has a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, and birth certificate. But a new Tennessee law requires all voters to have a valid state-issued voter ID in order to vote in the 2012 election. Because Dorothy took her husband's name at marriage, the state will not accept her birth certificate (or any of her other forms of identification). And because Dorothy doesn't have her marriage certificate, having been married decades ago, the state of Tennessee prohibits her from obtaining the ID needed to vote.
Dorothy is not alone. In Indiana, 12 nuns were denied the right to vote in the last presidential election because they didn't have "updated" identification. The facts that some of them had old passports, they were in their 80s and 90s and didn't drive--or that they're nuns--seemed not to be a good basis for affirming their identities.
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