DOROTHY COOPER, CHATTANOOGA, TN Source - TimesFreePress.com
Chattanooga Times Free Press – Ansley Haman
Dorothy Cooper is 96 but she can remember only one election when she’s been eligible to vote but hasn’t.
The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s and missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time.
So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new state law she’d need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.
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. GO TO STORY