OK…I’ve shared this before, but here goes again.
I bought a house back in 2013 and one of my neighbors is a black woman 78 years old. Born on a sharecroppers’ farm, no birth certificate ever issued since she’d never been to a shop after birth.
Family did eventually get a very of live birth years after she’d been born—had to have it to get into school.
Fast forward to 2013…she’s trying to register to vote. She’s never driven nor had a DL. She can REGISTER to vote because she’s got elect bill, water bill in her name…there’s a long list of acceptable docs that can be used to register—-buuuuuuut…..
But she CANNOT vote because she’s had extreme difficulty in obtaining a “Smart” ID, as required by GA as the only acceptable ID for voting identification—not registration. No birth certificate that can be ordered via that birth certificate on-line thing—both my wife and I used the same thing to obtain ours. Thankfully, both of us have DL’s so it was vastly easier. Her? No listing as she never had an “official” birth certificate.
So I personally spent days with her and one of her daughters (who was having to take time off from her LPN school she was attending to do this with significant pushback from the school), driving first to her birth county then to various agencies in Atlanta.
Unfortunately, I eventually gave up smashing my head into the intentionally built obstacles Republican have placed in the voting Regis/ID requirements. Gotta obtain birth cert. from one acceptable place, gotta have “REAL” ID or is it “Secure” ID—I forget—to vote, no other ID acceptable.
Why? Who knows why a literal ton of identification is acceptable to register yet only one form is acceptable for proving yourself at the polls. I mean WTF? For instance,university issued photo ID good to register to vote yet is no good to ID yourself at polls. Again, WTF?
I know you’ll probably call this an edge case, and it is, but does that matter? Shouldn’t.