4 VOTER FRAUD CASES DISENFRANCHISE 800,000 TEXANS.
The US Department of Justice in March blocked a new Texas state law that would require voters to show photo IDs, which could require 800,000 Texans who don’t have driver licenses or concealed weapons permits to apply for a special voter ID. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has said Texas has suffered from “multiple cases of voter fraud” and argued that the DOJ had no valid reason to reject the law, which supporters said was necessary to combat voter fraud. But the San Antonio Express-News reported (3/25) that the only four “illegal voting” complaints involving voter impersonations were filed with the Texas attorney general from the 2008 and 2010 elections. And the attorney general would not disclose the results of those cases.
ThinkProgress.org noted that at least nine people already have been denied their voting rights because they lacked the proper voter ID. One is Ricky Tyrone Lewis, a 58-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Milwaukee who has an honorable discharge but no record of his birth that he needs to obtain a voter ID card. Another is Ruthelle Frank, 84, a former elected official who voted in every election for the last 63 years but was unable to obtain a voter ID because the physician at her birth misspelled her name on her birth certificate, so she needs to pay hundreds of dollars to get a corrected birth certificate. Another is Dorothy Cooper, 96, an African American in Tennessee who has voted in every election but one since she became eligible to vote, but was turned away in her attempt to obtain a voter ID because she did not have a copy of her marriage license. She said she didn’t have problems voting in Tennessee during “Jim Crow days” — only now under voter ID. Thelma Mitchell, 93, cleaned the Tennessee Capitol for 30 years and had an old state ID from that job, but was denied a voter ID because she was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918 and there was no official record of her birth. The clerk who turned her away suggested she could be an illegal immigrant.
http://www.populist.com/12.07.dispatches.html
