General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A Black Man Brought 3 Forms of ID to the Polls in Wisconsin. He Still Couldn’t Vote. [View all]peace13
(11,076 posts)You get one paper and they need something else. My sister became disabled and moved back to Ohio so that I could help her. She needed an ID to vote and to travel by air. Her Idaho drivers license was still valid although she was confined to a wheelchair and could barely lift her head let alone a hand. We gathered all of the required information for the ID and went to the DMV. Oops, her name was in the Ohio system from when she was a teenager. Her maiden name was attached to her social security number. A new Ohio law required her to present divorce papers and marriage certificate to prove how her name had changed. My sister had been married three times so even if we had a copy of the last marriage certificate we still would not prove her maiden name. I asked the clerk to write down for me what she needed in order to process the ID because it was going to take a lot of leg work to get three marriage certificates from three different states and copies of the two additional divorce papers if that is what they were asking for. The clerk told us that she would not write it down for me because when we came back the law could have changed by then. OMG we were so frustrated. We had been in the office for over an hour with the wait and we're going home empty handed. At one point my other sister whispered to us that Lisa might have to marry our cousin Billy to get her maiden name back! We cracked up. Out of the peanut gallery of people waiting at the DMV came a middle aged man. He said, 'I don't know what kind of problem you ladies are having but I want to tell you that you have the best sense oh humor I have ever seen." That made our day. In the end we had to lave the building without an ID.
The next day I called a DMV branch where the clerk knew me from volunteering at the school. I asked her what she needed to make the ID happen. I took the one set of divorce papers in plus addition requested information, none of which showed maiden name. After an hour in the office and several calls to a State attorney we finally got the ID. While we were working this out a man from the peanut gallery came up and said he was in a hurry and couldn't wait any longer. The clerk told him to sit down and wait, that the person she was helping had a problem and that she was certain he would rather have his problem than hers.
My point in this story is that without an advocate things don't happen. The man in the story above, he had a moving target too. It takes, time, money and most often an advocate to work the system. People with empathy can see how these awful laws silence the voices of many. The rest will have to try and work through the system on their own to understand how stacked it is against the little guy. My heart goes out to the man in the article. It is a demeaning process.