F6, [...] "GOP lawmakers point to voter fraud as the reason for these new laws, even though study after study, investigation after investigation, has found that voter fraud is a minuscule problem in American elections. A major probe by the Bush Justice Department between 2002 and 2007, for example, failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter. Of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only eighty-six people for voter fraud. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud.
So essentially, based on a handful of suspicious incidents, 5 million eligible voters could be disenfranchised in 2012."
96-year-old Woman Who Voted During Jim Crow Is Denied Photo ID
At age 96, Dorothy Cooper is the new poster child for what's wrong with the state's photo ID voter law. A retired domestic worker living in Chattanooga, she never had any trouble voting even in the Jim Crow era and missed only one election in her entire adult life. But when she went for one of the state's new free photo IDs last month so she could keep voting, they turned her away. Why? Her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander, is on her birth certificate, and she didn't have her marriage license. Her story is on the front page of the Chattanooga Times Free Press today.
It's beginning to dawn on some Republicans that they might have overreached just a tad bit with this photo ID law. Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, is one of the main proponents, and even he is backpedaling. Yesterday, as liberal groups launched a petition drive against the law and the Senate held hearings into whether it's disenfranchising voters, Ketron introduced a bill to let anyone over the age of 60 vote by absentee ballot without a photo ID.
Ketron said he doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't want a photo ID. "They make you proud," he said.
An absentee ballot is the solution that's been offered Dorothy Cooper. But as she told the Times Free Press' Ansley Haman, she prefers to actually go to the polls, even though she has to do it in a walker. That's what makes people proud, not photo IDs. Here's a woman who has gone to her voting precinct to do her patriotic duty her whole life, even when the segregationist laws were intentionally aimed at preventing it. And now they tell her no.
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