Arkansas Tossed Ballot Of 79-Year-Old Woman Who Has Been Voting Since Jim Crow

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/10/10/3578451/meet-joy-voter-id-arkansas/

by Alice Ollstein Posted on October 10, 2014

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS—In a small one-story house filled with knickknacks and stuffed animals, Joy Dunn sat at her dining room table going over her absentee ballot. Turning the pages with long fingernails painted fire engine red, she said she wanted to make sure she had everything in order, as the vote she cast in March’s special election was never counted.

“I got a letter saying my vote wasn’t counted because I didn’t have ID. But I’ve been voting in this state since 1954 and I never had to have ID,” she told ThinkProgress. “I didn’t know I was supposed to send in an ID this time. Nobody told me.”

Dunn, who just turned 79, has several forms of valid ID, but says she was never notified that she had to include a copy of it with her absentee ballot. Arkansas is one of a tiny handful of state to require copies of ID from absentee voters, and the only state in the nation to make those over age 65 do. The only exceptions to this rule are for active duty service members and their spouses and residents of long-term care or residential care facilities.

This time, Joy is aware of the requirement, but it hasn’t been easy for her to meet it. Because of a foot injury that left her unable to drive, she had to ask a neighbor to take her drivers’ license to the library and bring her back a photocopy to include with her ballot. “I had to depend on somebody to go do it for me and that’s a hardship on me,” she said. “And most people don’t even have that kind of help! I think it’s unfair for a lot of us older people.”

She said this hardship reminded her of the very first time she cast a ballot, in Little Rock in 1954. She was forced to pay a $2 poll tax, which she said was “not much more” than people made working a full day’s shift. “It was a little white slip, looked like a rent receipt,” she said. “You had to have that slip to vote.”

Echoing comments made by the US Attorney General, members of Congress, and a federal district judge, Dunn said voter ID laws are the modern day equivalent of those poll taxes. “This is to do anything they can to stop some folks from voting,” she said.

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The confusion was exacerbated because the voter ID law itself included no plan and no budget whatsoever for reaching out and educating voters like Joy. While other states have spent millions just to raise public awareness of voter ID laws, Arkansas budgeted only $300,000 for the entire implementation of the ID law in all 75 counties, including machines to print new IDs.

“We’ll do whatever we can with the existing money that we have,” the Secretary of State’s office told the Arkansas New Bureau earlier this year.

The existing money didn’t amount to much. “They rented a few billboards and did some radio ads, but they didn’t even rent those billboards until May for the May primary,” ACLU Arkansas’ Holly Dickson said. “It would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so great.”

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“The absentee voters didn’t even know they needed to do this, and besides that, there’s a reason we allow people to vote absentee: you have to be unavoidably absent from the polls because of a disability or travel or something. Those situations don’t go away when you need come show an ID.”

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she told ThinkProgress: “It’s not going to stop me from voting, that’s for sure. I know that if you vote, it gives you a little small say, not much, but a little bit. And if enough get together, you can change things.”

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