Betty Brown MacMillan Green is 92 years old, and a resident of the Riverton community in Scotland County, roughly 90 miles slightly southwest of Raleigh. She retains a good wit and a keen judgment, and carries on, as do so many good people of her generation, with grit despite some physical infirmities.
This past January, those infirmities had her in the Scotland Memorial Hospital.
(A note up front: Betty Brown, as we call her, is my distant cousin, which has nothing whatever to do with the subject of this column. I'm probably kin to most of you in some way, which you may find disturbing.)
Green's daughter, Louise Andrews, is her full-time caregiver, and the two were having some difficulty getting around in an old car, so Green's son got them a car and was putting the title in both their names.
And here is where the story of one woman's pursuit of a photo identification card comes into play. The issue of a photo ID for purposes of voting in North Carolina elections is a front-burner one now, with Republicans in the General Assembly edging toward an attempted override of Gov. Beverly Perdue's veto of the bill that would make it necessary to present such identification when voting.
While GOP members touted the measure as a way to prevent voter fraud, they got all warm and fuzzy and said they'd fund ways for people to obtain identification cards. It seemed fairly harmless to me at first, frankly, but there was little question that some Republicans, at least, figured the requirement might put a damper on folks inclined to vote Democratic, perhaps the poor who didn't have driver's licenses, for one example.
The other problem with the GOP's logic about preventing fraud has to do with the fact that voter fraud is about as frequent in North Carolina as an earthquake.
Then there is Betty Brown, and doubtless many others like her.
So she's in the hospital, and she has to complete the work on the car title. The Division of Motor Vehicles apparently requires a current photo identification to do that.
"She doesn't drive," said her daughter, Louise Andrews. "And she was just getting out of the hospital, but I had to take her to the DMV, from there. There was still snow on the ground." (Snow in Scotland County being something that happens about as regularly as voter fraud, by the way.) "So I wheel her out to the car, in the snow, and she is hooked to an oxygen tank."
"When we went to the DMV, they wouldn't come out to the car to take her picture, so we had to get her into the wheelchair with the oxygen tank, and remember she'd just left the hospital. So we had to wheel her inside to get this picture, all so she could get her name on the car title."
It was, to put it mildly, quite the ordeal.
"They didn't make it easy," Andrews said, "and I can imagine [going through something similar] would be a problem for other people, older people who don't drive and are not mobile."
Exactly, and therein lies the rub, one of them, with this voter identification business. No matter how "easy" a system of providing the IDs was, it still would be a burden. An unnecessary burden. This is a play to emotion, seeking a perceived political gain based on "fixing" a problem that doesn't exist.
Betty Brown MacMillan Green did get her identification card, of course, so it will be handy next Election Day. She is somewhat proud of the fact that she has voted steadily over many decades. "She's a faithful voter," her daughter said. "I think she may have missed the last local election, but in the past she's voted absentee from the hospital."
The snow was on the ground and the January air was cold. An oxygen tank was needed along with a wheelchair. But Betty Brown got her identification card. It should not be that hard at the DMV or in whatever process is created to provide cards for voting.
And apparently any such identification, DMV or whatever, has to be current, in order to be sure, Louise Andrews said, "that it shows that you look like you look now." So it's good that Betty Brown has her photo ID in advance of the next election. Presumably she couldn't have used another proving citizenship ... the one identifying her as a WAVE in World War II.
