Via a lot of places, but I’ll just pick Taking Down Words, the Times of Northwest Indiana tells the tale of Christina Pearson, age 20, who was made to undertake “four trips to two branches and calls to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ Indianapolis headquarters in two days before Christina was able to get her ID card.”
The problem was that Christina has Down Syndrome and, consequently, does not happen to have the items on the list of approved documents the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles requires for a citizen to get a State ID. The communication for the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Dennis Rosenbrough explained that BMV staff is under very strict orders to accept only the approved laundry list of documents before issuing a State ID. Says Rosenbrough, “It’s very important for all states to issue the IDs in a very careful way. This is not unusual to Indiana in any stretch of the imagination.” It is my understanding that the federal government has become involved in issuance of State identification, ostensibly for national security reasons; so, he’s probably right that strict control over issuance of identification is not unique to Indiana. What is unique to Indiana, however, is the requirement that a citizen have one of these strictly controlled pieces of identification as a prerequisite to exercising that citizen’s constitutional right to vote.
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