93-year-old woman suing Pennsylvania over voter ID law

By David Ferguson
The Raw Story
May 8, 2012

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/08/93-year-old-woman-suing-pennsylvania-over-voter-id-law/

Viviette Applewhite, like many elderly Americans, does hot
have a birth certificate or a driver’s license. The 93-year-
old grandmother is suing the state of Pennsylvania over its
harsh new voter ID law, according to Think Progress.

Applewhite said she has voted in every election since she
voted for John F. Kennedy in 1962, but this year,
Pennsylvania’s harsh new voter ID law means that she and the
others who have no government issued photo ID will be unable
to cast a ballot this fall. She has been named as the
plaintiff in a suit brought against the state by the NAACP
and the ACLU.

Ms. Applewhite has tried for years to obtain a photo ID, but
to no avail. NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice
estimates that 25 percent of black adults have no form of
state-issued photo ID, as opposed to only eight percent of
white adults.

Pennsylvania’s law is similar to stringent voter ID laws
passed in Georgia, Alabama, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania,
Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Twenty-four other states are
currently attempting to pass voter ID laws, which have been
shown to disproportionately affect poor and minority voters.
Former President Bill Clinton said of the current Republican
push for voter ID laws, "There has never been in my lifetime,
since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens
on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that
we see today."

Republican legislators insist that these laws are necessary
to prevent vote fraud, but a Supreme Court decision from 2007
upholding Indiana’s law was only able to unearth one case of
in-person vote fraud in the last 143 years. Nonetheless, the
Brennan Center estimates that 5 million eligible U.S. voters
will be kept from the polls this fall by the new laws, a
larger number than the margin of victory in two of the last
three presidential elections.

Watch video of Ms. Applewhite discussing her suit against the
state of Pennsylvania, embedded via the ACLU, below:

To see the video, go to
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/08/93-year-old-woman-suing-pennsylvania-over-voter-id-law/

[David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously
writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two
shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at
Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a
book.]

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