[EL] Disenfranchised?

[Gabriel Gopen]

Why do you invariably operate under the assumption that every rightful citizen has ready access to documents?  Mr. Bergman's late grandmother was 89-years-old when she left Brooklyn.  Her naturalization papers would have been no less than four decades old. Perhaps the senior citizens you know all lead near, orderly lives with carefully labeled file cabinets.  But I do pro bono cases for AARP and the reality that I see is much more complicated.  If she possessed the papers at all (and not a male guardian), is that a reasonable record keeping burden? 
 How does that balance against the mere "perception" of a voter fraud problem in Iowa?

Oh, and Chag same'ach and happy Good Friday.  


> On Apr 14, 2017, at 7:54 AM, Smith, Brad <BSmith at law.capital.edu> wrote:
> 
> Would Ari Berman's mother really have been "disenfranchised" by the voter ID law advancing in Iowa? Since his mother voted, she presumably was a U.S. citizen. Since, as Berman explains, she was a U.S. citizen by naturalization, she would have naturalization papers. A resident of Iowa may obtain an Iowa non-operator ID by presenting naturalization papers. 
> 
> 
> Bradley A. Smith
> 
> Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault
> 
>    Professor of Law
> 
> Capital University Law School
> 
> 303 E. Broad St.
> 
> Columbus, OH 43215
> 
> 614.236.6317
> 
> http://law.capital.edu/faculty/bios/bsmith.aspx
> 
> From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] on behalf of Rick Hasen [rhasen at law.uci.edu]
> Sent: Friday, April 14, 2017 12:05 AM
> To: Election Law Listserv
> Subject: [EL] ELB News and Commentary 4/14/17
>  
>  
> “Iowa’s New Voter-ID Law Would Have Disenfranchised My Grandmother”
> Posted on April 13, 2017 8:42 pm by Rick Hasen
> Ari Berman for The Nation:
> My grandmother Sylvia moved from Brooklyn to Iowa when she was 89 years old. It was a culture shock, to say the least. When my mom took her to vote, she complained of the candidates, “There isn’t anybody who’s Jewish!”
> I thought of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005 at 99, when the Iowa Legislature passed a strict voter-ID law today. She didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove (she’d frequently walk two miles from her apartment to the grocery store). Her passport expired long ago. She never had a US birth certificate because she was born in Poland and fled the Holocaust. She used her Medicare card as identification. She didn’t possess any of the forms of government-issued photo identification that Iowa will soon require to vote.
> The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters—260,000 people—don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill. My grandmother, if she were still alive today, would have been one of them.
> 
> Posted in election administration, The Voting Wars
>  
> p://electionlawblog.org
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