The 94-Year-Old Civil-Rights Pioneer Who Is Now Challenging North Carolina’s Voter-ID Law

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-92-year-old-civil-rights-pioneer-who-is-now-challenging-north-carolinas-voter-id-law/

The 94-Year-Old Civil-Rights Pioneer Who Is Now Challenging North Carolina’s Voter-ID Law
Can Rosanell Eaton succeed in getting the new voter-ID law blocked before the 2016 election?
By Ari Berman
Today 11:40 am


Rob Stephens escorts Rosanell Eaton, a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the new North Carolina voting law, out of the Ward Federal building on Monday, July 7, 2014 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. AP Photo / Winston-Salem Journal, Andrew Dye).


On Monday, January 25, a federal court will hear a challenge to North Carolina’s voter-ID law. Ninety-four-year-old Rosanell Eaton will be a key witness against the law.

In 1942, the 21-year-old Eaton took a two-hour mule ride to the Franklin County courthouse in eastern North Carolina to register to vote. The three white male registrars told her to stand up straight, with her arms at her side, look straight ahead and recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory. After she did that word for word, they gave her a written literacy test, which she also passed. Eaton was one of the few blacks to pass a literacy test and make it on the voting rolls in the Jim Crow era.

A granddaughter of a slave, she became a lifelong voting-rights activist, personally registering 4,000 new voters before losing count. But in 2013, after voting for 70 years, she became a casualty of North Carolina’s new voter-ID law, which goes into effect this year, because the name on her voter registration card (Rosanell Eaton) did not match the name on her driver’s license (Rosa Johnson Eaton).

Beginning in January 2015, Eaton undertook a herculean effort to match her various documents and comply with the law. Over the course of a month, she made 11 trips to different state agencies—four trips to the DMV, four trips to two different Social Security offices, and three trips to different banks—totaling more than 200 miles and 20 hours. “It was really stressful and difficult, {a} headache and expensive, everything you could name,” she said.

snip//

The new restrictions had a clear negative impact in the last election. Democracy North Carolina estimated that “the new voting limitations and polling place problems reduced turnout by at least 30,000 voters in the 2014 election.” The group analyzed provisional ballots cast during the 2014 election and concluded that 2,344 rejected ballots would have been counted if the new restrictions, such as eliminating same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting, were not in place.

These voting problems occurred before the state’s voter-ID law took effect and before a highly contested presidential election. As voters begin to head to the polls to decide the next president, in the first presidential election since the VRA was gutted, the stakes are much higher in 2016.

[Paka]

1. Gutting the voting rights act was shameful,

as are all the odious rights-stripping regulations.

[appal_jack]

2. The fact that Ms. Eaton refuses to give up...

The fact that Ms. Eaton refuses to give up, that she continues to stand and demand her rights even at 94, even after all she has already endured, gives me hope.

Her determination and commitment toward basic voting rights that should be universal is the best news I have heard all day.

That anyone would oppose her is bad, bad news. But I believe that with true heroines like Ms. Eaton on our side, justice will prevail in NC.

Massive k&r,

-app

[G_j]

7. word..

[Dont call me Shirley]

3. My hero! What a woman!

[Gothmog]

4. This is a great article

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. k&r

[ladyVet]

6. Go, Ms. Eaton! The laws are unjust and illegal, and must be changed. nt