I am reposting my voter ID story

Since the Supreme Court is considering Indiana's Voter ID law, I thought it would be a good time to repost my journal entry detailing how Voter ID affected my mother. She died about a month after I posted this.

My mother won't be able to vote if voter ID becomes law
Posted by proud2Blib in General Discussion (01/01/06 through 01/22/2007)
Fri Sep 22nd 2006, 12:20 PM

Six months ago I would have said there is nothing wrong with asking voters for ID. Who doesn't have ID? Who is unable to prove who they are? I had no idea how this would affect my own mother.

Then MO passed a Voter ID law. My mother moved from KS to MO just a few months before the law was passed. My mother had not only never missed voting in any election since 1946, she also worked on every presidential campaign since then and canvassed for state and federal representatives. She donated money to every candidate she endorsed. Sometimes it was only a few dollars, but she gave enough and gave often enough that I still remember the mail she got at election time asking for her support. One of my earliest memories is knocking on doors for Kennedy when I was 6. So the political process and supporting candidates has always been important to my mother.

When she moved in March, she asked me to help her get registered to vote. I said okay, where is your driver's license? But she didn't remember what happened to it when she quit driving 10 years ago. So I said well, Mom, I know you have a passport, where is it? She went to the metal box my dad had used for years to store important documents but instead of documents, my mom had put snapshots of her wedding and some of our baby pictures in there. Those pictures are important to her now. Her passport was not and she could not remember where she had put it. She said but I knew I would never go out of the country again, so why do I need a passport? So I suspect the passport was thrown away.

My mother had worked for 40 years for a defense contractor here. Her job was purchasing some of the parts that went into nuclear missiles. Every 2 or 3 years, the FBI came to our house to speak to my dad, interviewed our neighbors and our relatives and declared that my mother was not a security risk so she got to keep her job. Each time she went through a clearance, she received a new picture ID badge that she had to wear to get in and out of the plant where she worked. I can remember playing dress up with her old IDs when I was a little girl. So I asked my mom where her work badge was and didn't she still have several of those lying around. She said yes, she remembered now, my dad had put those in that metal box. But that box only contains wedding pictures and baby pictures now. Those are important to her, her work badge is not.

So I said Mom let's just get a copy of your birth certificate and go from there. She said did you forget, Dear, I was born at home and I have never had a birth certificate. Remember how hard it was for me to get a passport and they said without a driver’s license it would have been really hard to get that passport? No I had not remembered that but 20 years ago when she got that passport I was busy raising little kids. So I said well you were baptized, weren't you? Let's contact the diocese and get your baptismal certificate.

Turns out her church had a fire in the 1940s and many records stored there were destroyed, including - you guessed it - my mom's baptismal certificate. There was also a flood in 1951 so those records were doomed one way or another.

So I decided to contact my mom's state reps. I emailed her congressperson and state senator. Turns out her senator knew my dad and was thrilled to hear from me and promised to help get my mom registered. But without ID, even he hit a brick wall. Her state rep said well you can get a birth certificate if you send an affidavit from a family member or anyone who knew her family when she was born and is willing to verify that your mother was born on such and such a day. But since my mom was both the oldest child and the oldest grandchild, she has no relatives who can verify her birth. Another brick wall.

Then the man who works at the local election board said get a copy of her current voter registration card from KS and maybe the state will accept that as proof of identity. So we did and they didn't. No picture on the voter registration card. We also sent copies of her SS card and Medicare card and Blue Cross card. No luck. They want a picture ID with her birthdate listed.

Four months after my mom first asked me to help her register to vote, we have hit one dead end after another. Bottom line - we can't get Mom registered so she can't vote. She will be given a provisional ballot, which won't be counted since she cannot prove her identity.

Now if anyone thinks this is okay, I want to hear from you. I want to know why it is acceptable to disenfranchise an 81 year old woman whose only crime is being senile enough to lose her drivers license and passport (neither of which she needed anyway).

This is what is wrong with Voter ID. I know for a fact that my mom is not alone. There are estimates of anywhere from 12,000 to 60,000 voters without a picture ID in MO.

So PLEASE, before you go on about nothing wrong with showing ID to vote, remember my mother. She has never been arrested, she has always had great credit, she worked hard all her life and raised 4 kids, she is a life long Democrat, she is the smartest woman I have ever known, and now that she is 81 and should not have to worry about a thing, she can’t vote.

Do you get it now? Voter ID is evil. Please speak out. Copy this post if you want and send it to your Congress critters. Get this legislation thrown out. PLEASE.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/proud2Blib/15

seems to me a diversion from the real fraud-Diebold. But, one of your statements about her never being arrested raised a question. What does that matter?

as that could have been one way we could prove that she was who she was.

after our rural mailbox had been run down and run over three times, we got a P.O. Box in town.

Recently, we got a notice that they had "been informed" that we had moved and our voter reigistration had been suspended.

Nice.

and my purse was stolen in 2005.

It took me forever to get a new driver's license, even though they have my picture and my thumb print on file.

They weren't interested in anything but my birth certificate, which was burned in the fire, and to get a new birth certificate, I needed a driver's license.

Ick.

Texas, our Texas,
All hail the mighty State.

Texas, our Texas,
So wonderful, so great.

Really . . . that's how our state song begins!

Arkansas driver's license! Her valid OK license isn't enough anymore. She must have a certified copy of her birth certificate and she doesn't have that. Without an Arkansas driver's license, she couldn't register to vote even with a valid University of Arkansas picture ID!

I could hardly believe it. I moved to 7 different states with my former employer and each time just traded in my driver's license from the old state for a new one. This isn't the United States of America that I grew up in.

It is not Homeland Security run amok. It is an effort to curtail voter fraud, something you will undoubtedly be preventively supporting in the upcoming Presidential elections.

I seriously doubt that very many of your cited 12-60,000 voters without a picture ID in Missouri have circumstances quite as irremediable as your Mother's. Her predicament was sad and regrettable. But the new law did not CAUSE her problem. She was not a victim of the change in the law.

There might have been other avenues for verifying her identity (going back to the Kansas DMV for her prior driving record, the State Department for her passport record, the FBI or Defense Intelligence Agency (whatever agency actually issued her contractor clearance), her high school or college for transcripts, her marriage certificate and the birth records of her own children including yourself, and taking those along with Social Security records and a statement about the destroyed records from the church where she was baptized, to a Missouri DMV document examiner and up that administrative decision chain if necessary, in the interests of getting her a non-driver ID in that state. Or the same documents straight to the Supervisor of Elections; let them deny and you appeal it. Your state representatives failed you miserably in their ingenuity and resourcefulness.

But finally, it bothers me more that, despite Mom knowing and admitting the driver's license and the passport were so difficult and critical to obtain without her birth record, that she was "senile" (your word) enough to lose/discard both of them. What on earth had she been using, for example, to cash checks for the prior ten years? What might have happened if her identity needed to be established for other reasons?

Far be it from me to suggest that your Mom should have been deprived of that which had always been so important to her. But perhaps the time had come where it was ONLY by the indulgence of a dutiful and loving daughter that Mom retained a semblance of some of the familiar touchstones in her life?

I think you are throwing the baby out with the bath water because you are still grieving about this.

There has not been one case in Indiana (the case before the Supreme Court) of voter fraud. Not one. If it's such a horrible rampant thing, then where are the cases? Where's the proof? The truth is that there isn't voter fraud but instead election fraud--and no huge stack of photo IDs would change that. This is all about making it hard for people to vote--those with money will have the IDs they need and be able to vote, and those without money or who have lost their paperwork due to fraud or fire or age will not.

In the American I grew up in, it was a mark of our freedom that we didn't need to carry around papers and produce them whenever anyone asked, like they did in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. We were better than our enemies then, and we're better than our enemies now. We don't need to carry around our passports, and for crying out loud, we shouldn't need to! Either we're as free as we say we are or we're no longer the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

It's a fake issue. How many cases of voter fraud are there? I live in a bi-state area. If voter fraud was a problem, you would think there would be people going back and forth across the state line every election to vote in two states. But they aren't.

It's a non issue - a way to disenfranchise voters. DEMOCRATIC voters.

I resent your suggestion that there was something we could have done to get the documentation necessary to get my mom registered to vote. We spent SIX MONTHS trying to do just that. There was NOTHING we could do. NOTHING. We worked with the elections board and officials in TWO states. The law was way too restrictive. And fortunately the courts in the state agreed and didn't make the assumptions you did.

I also resent your implication that we were careless and allowed my mother to misplace her license and other documents. She didn't need to cash checks. We took care of her. We paid all of her bills and made her life so comfortable she didn't need to write checks or worry about paying bills. So to imply I somehow failed her as a daughter is WAY over the top.

I met many other people in the same circumstances my mother was in. Elderly people. Disabled people. People who had never driven and had never had identification. They exist. Lots more than you realize.

Throwing the baby out with the bath water? MY ASS!!

You are reading far more into my post than was originally intended, and reacting defensively. Only you know why.

Yes, there possibly WAS more that you could have administratively done, had you gotten truly competent and determined help in doing it (how on earth did you conclude that I said this was your fault?), and - now that you bring it up - perhaps more that you could have done personally to prevent it from happening if you're now saying that she was being "taken care of" so assiduously by family members. I wasn't going there, but you did. You can resent it all you like and the resentment still doesn't spring from anything but your own subjective thinking. I wasn't privy to your life with Mom, and I only know what you said yourself. You said it had impacted your thinking about this issue; what I said was yes, for the wrong and probably more emotional than rational reasons.

Voter fraud doesn't exist? My own ass. How on earth do you think election fraud was most commonly and easily accomplished prior to the electronic age? The chief difference is that the provability of it goes down a different sort of rabbit hole, and people do believe what they want to believe and forget what's inconvenient when the dust settles, don't they?

(Would you also care to research some history of what was popularly said about the institution of official birth records or social security numbers or consumer credit reports or TELEPHONES AND CABLE TELEVISION, or anything else perceived as sinister and invasive of personal rights to privacy in its respective introductory day?)

How many of those vulnerable people you cited had the added dilemma of no extant birth records, and moreover, nothing else to substitute for them? How many of the non-drivers and disabled couldn't get a state photo I.D. with a few dollars and possibly an advocate to help them? (How many of those individuals are being or will be victimized by identity theft?) Tell me again that your mother's experience is anything but anecdotal. My own ass.

Okay, let me say for the sake of argument that you're right and voter fraud is an utter red herring. You are still promoting another fallacy. If you are claiming a greater disenfranchisement conspiracy of some sort (and you ARE), how could it be that your "victimized" individuals are exclusively Democrats? Wouldn't such a universal conspiracy impact all potential voters equally?

I could very well come out wrong on the basic issue in the end, proud2Blib, and I can see that we're never going to agree. If I change my mind or have a revelation someday, I will come and beg your forgiveness. But your highly personalized approach and otherwise flawed reasoning on this simply comes off sounding delusional. You are being subjective and projecting "evil" into voter I.D. the same way you projected your own - okay, I'm going to say it - uneasy conscience into my comments.

Listening to a story on Democracy Now, about the case going before the supremes, I thought about your Mom. Was wondering whether or not she was ever able to get an ID. I'm sorry to hear of your loss.

One of attorneys that was working on the case said that as there had never been an incident of this kind of fraud in Indiana, the ID law was a solution looking for a problem.

:kick:

where there is no voter ID. We still had not sold her house and she still got mail there so we decided to just let her vote where she had always voted at her old address. Then three days before she died, the MO voter ID law was thrown out. She was so excited. The last time I talked to her we made plans to go register her to vote.

I live in Kansas and when I go vote, I give my name and they cross it off a list. I do not have to show ID. And no one else can come into that polling place and claim to be me and vote. It's a very simple, tamper proof process. There is no reason for voter ID. We also have advance voting. We can either mail in a ballot or go to the county election office and vote anytime 3 weeks before the election. There is no reason to make voting hard. But the people who are promoting voter ID want to make voting a chore. It's absolutely ridiculous.

proud2Blib

I am sad to hear about your mothers problem, it should be that difficult to get a prow that your mother is what she claim to be...? This sound not as a healthy issue... And I bet your mothers ID are somewhere to be found, if just the government in the state you are living it want to do the work.. But Bureaucracy is the same thing everywhere I guess

I don't know how thing is going around in US, but here in Norway all Norwegian have a 11 digit birth number, everyone who are registered as living in Norway, have this type of digit. If our government need to get information, or we need some help, we can give this 11 digit to the government and all relevant information are coming up om the computer screen.. Name is One thing they can do, to get the information. But we can also get it by our birth number (fødselsnummer) In my case, it is the month the day I am born and then the year.. It is like something like 22/12/86. and them 5 digit who are specially for my (like 12456) With this number I can pay my bills, my taxes, everything I am can be found by this number

When I was going to the police to renew my passport, I have to give away my old passport, and a new passport was issued, and in the passport I do have today, my birht nr is printed.. As in all official document I may have... drivers license as its like...

I don't claim that it is More easy than your system.. But I just want to tel how thing works here.. And we do have to give proof for that we are who we claim to be when we wote, But a bankcards, or driver license is good enough for the voting officials to se that we are what we claim to be...

Maybe a birth number can be what are needed in US too?.. A special number who are following everyone from their birth to their death... ? I don't know..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad English, not my native language

"Voter fraud" is Orwellian for "don't look at how Bush is suppressing the vote"...

That's the part that infuriates me about the concept: Voter fraud is miniscule. Vote suppression that disenfranchises tens of thousands is huge.

And this Voter ID business is just one more method of (a) clamping down society and (b) suppressing the vote by disenfranchising ever greater numbers of citizens.

I'm so sorry about your mother. Presumably Social Security knows who she is, and presumably the company that sends her pension checks knows too. The whole exercise is just asinine.

I want my country back.

Hekate

to suppress votes, disguised as Voter ID.

Glad to see you get it but I am also not surprised that you do. :hi: