Fight This. Fight This Like Rabid Ferrets

From Wonkette's own Outrage on Wheels Ken Layne:

Racist Republicans in Tennessee have their first success with the new “Voter ID” requirement: A 96-year-old black lady who has voted in all but one election (in 1960) that she was legally eligible to vote in has been denied the right to take part in democracy. Why? Oh, just some piece of missing paperwork. That’s the point of “Voter ID,” to stop people you don’t want voting — the poor, minorities, take your pick! — on a technicality. This is how so many black Americans were denied the vote in the South for a hundred years after being “emancipated.”

Dorothy Cooper, who worked her whole life as a housemaid, went down to see the authorities because she’d heard Tennessee’s racist new law would require a pile of documents for those who tried to vote in the future. And she was denied a Voter ID by a clerk at the counter, just as planned by the evil legislators who approved the law:

That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.

“But I didn’t have my marriage certificate,” Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.

“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Cooper said.

We know what difference it makes. Dorothy Cooper is African-American. Occupy Chattanooga. Take everything from the rich whites and give it to the poor blacks.

Steven Benen:

Keep in mind, Dorothy Cooper has been voting for seven decades, but that was before Republicans decided that an imaginary problem required new restrictions to make it harder for voters to participate.

Indeed, in this specific case, Dorothy Cooper, an African-American woman living in the South, found it easier to vote during the Jim Crow era than under the new Republican rules. She’s found it easier to register before the Voting Rights Act than in 2011.

One of the main GOP proponents of the restrictions in Tennessee, apparently embarrassed, suggested this week senior citizens perhaps should be allowed to vote by absentee ballot without a photo ID.

But Cooper wants to go to the polls and cast her vote. It apparently brings her a sense of pride.

And next year, she’ll likely be one of 5 million Americans that an offensive Republican scheme will keep from the polls.

Yeah, thanks a fucking lot, Disappointed Democrats who stayed home last November and saddled the rest of us with anti-American repug demons disguised as governors and state legislators. Too late now for anyone to fix, but national Democrats are trying.

TPM:

Democrats are pivoting off a new report showing five million of their voters could be disenfranchised next year with a new multi-level attack aimed at new voter restriction laws across the country.

Starting Wednesday, the DSCC is going up with a online plan called the 2012 Election Protection Project, designed to “raise awareness and fight back against partisan attacks on voting rights.”

The program includes online tools and advertisements across several online platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The ads direct visitors to online petitions.

Here’s what the sponsored tweets pushing the program look like:

Use this tool. Work with your local Democratic party to find voters without whatever ridiculous ID your state's repugs are demanding and help those voters get registered and to the polls.

Every voter that you rescue from the repugs' New Jim Crow multiplies the value of your own vote by a factor of 10.

Fight this. Fight this like rabid ferrets.