The War on Women Voters

Elderly voters losing out on voter participation is a very real thing, as evidenced recently in Wisconsin. But instead, she says advocates should be focused on voters who resemble her: A middle-aged New York transplant living in Philadelphia, who commutes up and down the East Coast, traveling without a driver’s license. Like many New Yorkers, Anderson doesn’t drive so she doesn’t need one. She has a non-driver’s photo identification from New York, and other than that she has a passport. It wasn’t easy getting a New York ID, Anderson told me, and she’s concerned chiefly with women like her who might also have troubles getting the ID they need to vote, especially if they’ve been recently married, divorced or if they’ve moved, all of which could lead to name and address mismatches on Election Day.

The new Pennsylvania photo voter ID law is “disenfranchising by design to make voters jump through all these hoops,” said Anderson. “It’s unreasonable that women, with all that’s going on in their lives, will then have time to sit down and Google ‘where do I get my birth certificate,’ ‘where do I find my marriage certificate,’ ‘where to find the closest social security office,’ the hours they’re open, how to get there, and once there do they have all the documents they need.”

Anderson was able to do it, but she is a long-time voting rights advocate, and is trained to know the answers to these questions. But there are many women who are ill-served by the new photo voter ID laws. A Brennan Center for Justice survey shows that ten percent of voting-age Americans don’t have ID with both current name and address on it -- many of those are women whose last names change with marriages, and whose address might change due to separations, divorces or just trying to get away from an abusive spouse situation.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/167369/war-women-voting?2

I have to say, this is an issue I had not thought of. I know here in PA that the Amish and Mennonites will not be able to vote because of this new law, as well as poor, black, and elderly voters but I had not considered the ramifications of women voters.