For example, my wife's 86 year old mother had a stroke and the state of Washington has revoked her drivers license. In order to vote she has to have a VALID photo ID and her DL is no longer valid. My wife was going to get her a state photo ID but that requires a birth certificate, which she doesn't have a copy of. She's never had a passport so at the moment she's caught in limbo.
Besides, it's the principle of the thing. The only reason that there are even photo-ID laws on the books is because the GOP has created this big lie about voter fraud as if half the elections in the past 20 years have been tainted by thousands of illegal voters casting ballots. The problem is that it's just NOT true. You can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) as to how many people have been charged (let along convicted) with actually voting who were not qualified to do so. Yet there is evidence that thousands of people who did have the right to vote have been prevented from doing so as a result of tactics put in place by Republican Secretary of States around the country. One their favorites is to send out registered letters just a few days before voters need to have registered to vote and any that comes back those people are immediately removed from the voter rolls under the idea that they no longer live at the address in the records. But what about military personal who are deployed, or college students, some simply on vacation or out of town on business the day the postal service attempted to deliver the letter? Then there was the case in Florida back in 2000 where the Kathryn Harris, the Republican secretary of state, hired a company in Texas which produced a list of names of people who had been imprisoned IN Texas (conveniently the list was mostly of African Americans and Hispanics) and they compared the names from this list to the names of registered voters IN Florida and any match was stricken from the rolls. No attempt was made to verify is this was really the same person, their name was removed and the first that they heard about it was election day when they were denied a ballot because their names couldn't be found on the printout of their precinct rolls. And what about Ohio in 2004 with the mystery votes which suddenly appeared out of no where, virtually 100% of which just happened to have been 'cast' for George W. Bush? Or the problem with the difference between exit polls and the final results? Exit polling has proven to be very accurate over the years, that is until this past 2010 elections. While most of the country the statistics were pretty much what had been seen in the past, but oddly in many of the closest and most contended races, in those cases the difference between the exit polls and the 'official' counts were so far off that it boggled the imagination. There was no explanation. It was statistically impossible for a percentage of races to be that far off (and in the past these districts had conformed with the exist polls very well) but only in some of the most highly contested races. If the international community had seen something like this in some 3rd world country there would have been demands that the UN investigate the results. Perhaps we should demand that the UN start sending election observers to our country since it looks like we do have voter corruption in this country, just NOT the type that the Republicans claim that photo-IDs will resolve.
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