Woman who faced Jim Crow takes on North Carolina's powers over voting rights

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/north-carolina-voter-id-law-jim-crow-african-american
<snip>
Rosanell Eaton was talking to her daughter at home in Louisburg, North Carolina, not long ago when she suddenly lowered her voice and looked strangely deflated. “You know, all of this is coming back around before I could get in the ground,” she said. “I was hoping I would be dead before I’d have to see all this again.”

Rosanell Eaton is now 93. To her consternation, she finds herself once again facing an obstacle that she believes is designed, just as it was 75 years ago, to disenfranchise her and her fellow black North Carolinians. In July 2013 the state’s Republican-controlled general assembly pushed through HB 589, a law that in several ways makes it more difficult for those who are young, older, poor and, especially, African American to participate in the democratic process.

Eaton is a plaintiff in a challenge to the new law that will be heard Thursday by the fourth US circuit court of appeals in Charlotte, North Carolina. The case, in which the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to block the law’s implementation ahead of a full trial next year, is being watched intensely by both sides of the political divide, as it will determine the rules under which the midterm elections will be fought in a key swing state with a closely-fought Senate battle, between sitting Democratic senator Kay Hagan and one of the Republican architects of HB 589, Thom Tillis.

In court documents the plaintiffs – including the NAACP, represented by the Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters, represented by the ACLU – set out the various ways in which the new law, HB 589, throws obstacles in the path of potential voters. It reduces the number of early voting days; imposes a requirement, to go into effect in 2016, that voters show photo ID cards at the polls; eliminates the ability to register to vote and then cast a ballot on the same day; invalidates any ballot cast by an individual outside her or his precinct; encourages strangers to challenge the eligibility of people standing in line to vote; and scraps a program to pre-register teenagers ahead of their 18th birthdays.
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The ReTHUG racists are going to lose this case

[merrily]

1. Getting ID when you have none is a hassle.

While the authorities work through courts, please make sure everyone you know, including your neighbor, has ID. If not, ask if you can help in some way.

Yes, if the court process works in your state before November--assuming someone is even working on that in you state--you may have wasted your time and that of the person whom you helped. But, there is no guaranty of that and voting may well be the most important state right we have. Everything, state and federal, turns on whom we elect.