A new piece at National Review Online picks apart the Left’s latest attack on North Carolina’s new voter identification law.
The Left has a new martyr. Rosanell Eaton is a 92-year-old black woman with a compelling story about the harm done to vulnerable people, especially members of minority groups, by North Carolina’s new voter-ID law.
But none of it holds up. Rosanell Eaton isn’t a martyr at all, in fact. …
… Mrs. Eaton, their standard-bearer, has just the sort of personal history that critics of the law want to bring to the fore. It indeed speaks to the country’s racist past: Mrs. Eaton was one of the first blacks to register to vote in her county, after completing a literacy test that required her to recite the preamble to the Constitution. Given that personal history, she deserves to be hailed for her intrepid commitment to voting rights.
The Left’s case, though, is that she’s facing the same sort of obstacle today.
Mrs. Eaton and the North Carolina state conference of the NAACP claim in a federal lawsuit that the law will directly injure her because it means she will “incur substantial time and expense” reconciling her driver’s license and her birth certificate with her voter-registration record, all three of which have different spellings of her name.
This is flatly false for at least four different reasons.
First, she already has a driver’s license, as the lawsuit concedes. This is an important point because so much of the criticism of the law relies on the assumption that many people in the Tar Heel State don’t have valid photo identification, and thus will be blocked from voting. But the woman whom the Left wants to make the face of the victims already has valid ID.
Follow the link above for more rebuttal.