A legal challenge to Virginia’s voter ID law began similarly to the way one in North Carolina began last month: With an elderly black woman detailing what she went through when asked for a photo ID card at a polling place. In North Carolina it was 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton. In Virginia on February 23 it was 69-year-old Josephine Okiakpe, who cried as she testified in court:
Josephine Okiakpe said she plucked several forms of ID from her purse — birth certificate, Social Security card, voter registration card, even a bank statement — and handed them over to workers at her Woodbridge polling place. The only things she had with her picture on them were her North Carolina driver’s license and an expired Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles ID card.
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As she haggled with the poll workers, she said some other voters looked at her and snickered.
“I felt very frustrated, very upset,” she said, trying to fight back tears.
Virginia’s challenge to the voter ID law comes from the Democratic Party, which contends that the law restricts blacks, young people, and Latinos from participating, as these groups tend to vote Democrat when they do. Republicans in southern state legislatures in particular maintain that voter ID laws put a check on voter fraud even though the evidence of voter fraud is next to nil, but the evidence of black voter participation is high. That is, participation was high as long as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was in effect. Once key parts of it were struck down by the Supreme Court, a slew of voter identification laws sprang up across the country.
Also not surprising, all of these shenanigans are taking place in red states that were formerly slave states.
Nope. Not surprising in the least.