10.29.14
TX GOP Voter ID Law Denied 93-Year-Old Veteran A Ballot
Texas Election Judge Had To Turn Away 93-Year-Old Veteran Due To Strict Voter ID Law.
In the six days that early voting has been underway in Texas, election judge William Parsley on Sunday said he has only seen one potential voter turned away at his polling location, the Metropolitan Multi-Services Center in downtown Houston.
“An elderly man, a veteran. Ninety-three years old,” Parsley, an election judge for the last 15 years, told ThinkProgress. “His license had expired.”
Under Texas’ new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation, citizens are required to present one of seven forms of photo identification to vote. The identification can be a Texas-issued driver’s license, a federally-issued veteran’s ID card, or a gun registration card, among other forms. Licenses can be expired, but not for more than 60 days.
The man Parsley said he had to turn away was a registered voter, but his license had been expired for a few years, likely because he had stopped driving. Parsley said the man had never gotten a veteran’s identification card. And though he had “all sorts” of other identification cards with his picture on it, they weren’t valid under the law — so the election judges told him he had to go to the Department of Public Safety, and renew his license.
“He just felt real bad, you know, because he’s voted all his life,” Parsley said.
The Texas GOP’s excuse back in 2011 for passing such a restrictive bill, that if there is just one case of “voter fraud” that’s too many, can now be seen for what it was. An attempt to keep certain types of voters from voting. The reality is this law will disenfranchise many times more voters then ever voted fraudulently.
And there are hundreds of thousands of Texans that are losing their right to vote because of this law. The worst part about this story is that this was the Texas GOP’s plan all along. They knew this was going to happen when they passed the law back in 2011, Republicans Knew Voter ID Law Would Disenfranchise over 500,000 Voters.
There have been only two cases of voter impersonation in the past ten years in Texas. To prevent a third case, Republicans have passed a law that will prevent over half a million registered Texans from voting. What makes it worse is that they knew how many people would be disenfranchised.
In 2011, Republican lawmakers requested information from the Texas Secretary of State and Department of Public Safety regarding how many registered voters did not have state-issued photo IDs. The answer was at least 504,000 and potentially as many as 844,000. But that didn’t stop them.
According to the Texas Tribune, “Republican state officials working to pass a voter photo ID law in 2011 knew that more than 500,000 of the state’s registered voters did not have the credentials needed to cast ballots under the new requirement. But they did not share that information with lawmakers rushing to pass the legislation.”
David Dewhurst was one of them. According to an elections official, “Lt. Gov. Dewhurst was aware of the no-match list results showing 678,000 to 844,000 voters being potentially disenfranchised.”
They knew so many would lose their right to vote and that didn’t matter to them. As long as it kept them in power, damn the rights of others. Kuff has more, The larger issue on voter ID.