Last week, 96-year-old Dorothy Cooper, who has only missed voting in one election, collected her rent receipt, a copy of her lease, voter registration card, and birth certificate, and went down to the Tennessee Driver Service Center in Chattanooga to pick up a photo ID. Under recently passed state laws created by Republican lawmakers, a government-issued photo ID is now a requirement to cast a ballot in Tennessee. But despite all her documentation, she was denied an ID.

Donna Brazile, DNC vice chair for voter registration and participation, tells Cooper's story on CNN.com:

"Under the new Republican law, this still wasn't good enough. Tennessee refused to issue Mrs. Cooper a photo ID because the last name on her birth certificate is different from her married name, the name she uses now. But she has no marriage certificate, so she cannot clear up the discrepancy to Tennessee's satisfaction. And so she cannot enter a voting booth and have her vote counted."

This is just the latest outrageous example of Republican-passed photo ID laws—which serve to make it harder for eligible Democratic voters (the elderly, the poor, youth and minorities) to make it to the polls on Election Day. Brazile writes:

"Cooper has always displayed a remarkable commitment to our democracy. It is time that we do same. This weekend, we dedicate a national memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We may have thought that restrictions on the right to vote were behind us. But in 2011, Republican leaders are more interested in protecting themselves from defeat than protecting a citizen's right to vote.

"As Mrs. Cooper's experience shows us, photo ID mandates simply don't work -- unless, of course, your goal is to prevent eligible Americans from voting."

Read the full commentary at CNN.com.

Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had never encountered a problem attempting to vote—not even, she says, in the years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law.

Born in the years before women had the right to vote, she cast her first ballot in her 20s and missed only one election—1960—due to a move.

So when she learned that a new Tennessee law, pushed through by state Republicans, would require her to present a photo ID to vote in the 2012 election, she diligently made plans to get a ride over to the state Driver Service Center to get a free ID. In 96 years, she'd never needed one before.

When she got there, despite presenting a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card, and her birth certificate, Cooper was denied a photo ID of her own.

The reason? She didn't have her marriage certificate.

"I don't know what difference it makes," she says.

Neither do we. But this is the kind of story we're going to hear again and again over the next year, because Cooper's story is just the latest outrageous example of recent legislation, passed by Republican statehouses and governors, creating barriers to voting. More than 38 states have introduced voting legislation, and 12 states have already approved new obstacles like photo ID laws and the repeal of same-day registration.

It's voters like Cooper who are overwhelmingly affected: the elderly, African Americans, young people, poor people. Rolling Stone recently reported that more than 10 percent of American citizens lack necessary identification, but among the traditional Democratic voting blocs, the numbers are much higher: 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African Americans.

Read the full story at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and learn more about the cost of photo ID laws from our Voting Rights Institute.

Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had never encountered a problem attempting to vote—not even, she says, in the years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law.

Born in the years before women had the right to vote, she cast her first ballot in her 20s and missed only one election—1960—due to a move.

So when she learned that a new Tennessee law, pushed through by state Republicans, would require her to present a photo ID to vote in the 2012 election, she diligently made plans to get a ride over to the state Driver Service Center to get a free ID. In 96 years, she'd never needed one before.

When she got there, despite presenting a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card, and her birth certificate, Cooper was denied a photo ID of her own.

The reason? She didn't have her marriage certificate.

"I don't know what difference it makes," she says.

Neither do we. But this is the kind of story we're going to hear again and again over the next year, because Cooper's story is just the latest outrageous example of recent legislation, passed by Republican statehouses and governors, creating barriers to voting. More than 38 states have introduced voting legislation, and 12 states have already approved new obstacles like photo ID laws and the repeal of same-day registration.

It's voters like Cooper who are overwhelmingly affected: the elderly, African Americans, young people, poor people. Rolling Stone recently reported that more than 10 percent of American citizens lack necessary identification, but among the traditional Democratic voting blocs, the numbers are much higher: 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African Americans.

Read the full story at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and learn more about the cost of photo ID laws from our Voting Rights Institute.

Rolling Stone's latest issue includes a report on the Republican campaign to suppress the Democratic voting blocs that elected Barack Obama in 2008—what one civil-rights advocate calls "the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century."

Republican attempts to suppress the vote are nothing new. The magazine quotes conservative activist Paul Weyrich, who told evangelical leaders in 1980: "I don't want everyone to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But with 38 states introducing voting legislation and 12 states already having approved new obstacles, the GOP's war on voting has never been so far-reaching or so effective as it is today.

The new voter-suppression laws—passed by Republican governors and state legislators crying wolf over unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud—take shape in different ways. Kansas and Alabama residents must now provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote. Maine has repealed Election Day voter registration. Florida and Iowa have barred all ex-felons from the polls. Five states have limited their early-voting periods, and six states will now require voters to produce a government-issued photo ID before casting ballots.

One thing is constant: Democratic voters are overwhelmingly affected. More than 10 percent of American citizens lack necessary identification, but among the traditional Democratic voting blocs, the numbers are much higher: 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African Americans.

These new laws could affect the outcome of the 2012 elections. President Bill Clinton told students in July: "Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate. There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today."

Read—and share—the full article at Rolling Stone.

We've just read reports that a top official at the Republican National Committee (RNC) was likely involved in a scheme to interfere with an upcoming Democratic primary election in Wisconsin. 

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, who has been covering the issue, reported yesterday that the Wisconsin Republican Party adopted a plan to delay those elections with the hope of benefiting state Republicans:

Wisconsin Republicans were recently nabbed discussing ways of meddling in Dem primary politics for the explicit purpose of delaying recall elections against vulnerable GOP state senators. The idea was that putting off the elections might give them more time to mobilize and perhaps prevent them from getting booted from office, and the head of Wisconsin state senators has actually embraced the move.

As it turns out, a top RNC official may have been intimately involved in that tampering. Today, Sargent details the relationship between the national party and Wisconsin state Republicans’ efforts to meddle in the Democratic primary:

When the La Crosse Tribune first broke the story earlier this month, the paper reported that one Mark Jefferson, then the executive director of the Wisconsin state GOP, had been recorded discussing the plan with local GOP officials. Jefferson had served in that position for four years, as the right hand man of the Wisconsin state chairman, Reince Priebus. Priebus, of course, is now the head of the Republican National Committee.

Even as the story about the Wisconsin GOP scheme was breaking, it was already known that Jefferson would be moving to the RNC to play the role of midwestern regional director, a significant position.

No one is saying that the RNC itself played an active role in developing the plan. But Jefferson himself has in the past denounced such schemes as highly unethical. Last year, when Republicans accused Dems of running a spoiler candidate in a GOP primary in an Assembly race, Jefferson slammed it as a “nasty, cynical ploy.”

Click here to read the full article.