Voters’ Champion:
Brenda Williams
When Brenda C. Williams, M. D., a
family practitioner in Sumter, S.C.,
heard last year that the state legislature would require voters to show
a government-issued photo ID, she
smelled trouble.
She knew that the births of many
older African Americans born at
home in the rural South were never
officially recorded. Without a birth
certificate, they’d have difficulty
getting a government-issued ID
and would be barred from voting.
So Williams made a vow: “We’ve got
to help as many people as possible.”
Spending hundreds of hours at
her computer, thousands of her
own dollars and countless late
nights, Williams has helped dozens
of citizens get the all-important
photo ID card so they can vote in
this year’s elections. And she has a
waiting list.
For Williams, 59, who carries her
late father’s tattered NAACP membership card in her wallet, enfranchising voters has been a lifelong
quest. Since 1982, she and her
husband, Joe Williams, 60, a geriatrician, have registered patients to
vote as routinely as they’ve tested
their blood pressure.
“We take care of not only the
physical body but the whole individual,” she says. “Medicine is about
more than blood pressure … People
also have social and emotional
needs. We work with their feeling of
self-worth, and voting contributes
to self-worth.”
11 percent of adult citizens—more than 21
million people—lack a valid, government-issued photo ID, according to a study by the
Brennan Center for Justice at the New York
University School of Law.
Increasingly, this puts their right to vote
at risk. A year ago, only Georgia and Indiana
required photo ID cards to vote. Since then,
34 states have introduced voter ID laws. Five
enacted them, governors in five other states
vetoed them, and other states are considering them.
“What’s new is the no-photo-no-vote” laws,
said Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow specializing
in elections at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. “The 2010 elections’ big shift toward Republican control of
state legislatures was certainly a piece of that.”
Older voters most affected
The trend alarms voting advocates like Lawrence Norden, acting director of the Brennan
Center’s Democracy Program, who said photo ID laws hit older people, the poor, African
Americans and students the hardest. “This is
the first time in decades that we have seen a
reversal in what has been a steady expansion
of voting rights in the United States,” Norden
said. “There’s no question that citizens over
65 will be particularly impacted. The older
you get, the more likely you won’t have an ID.”
Nearly one in five citizens over 65—about
8 million—lacks a current, government-issued photo ID, a 2006 Brennan Center study
found. Most people prove their eligibility to
vote with a driver’s license, but people over
65 often give up their license and don’t replace it with the state-issued ID that some
states offer non-driving residents. People
over 65 also are more likely to lack birth certificates because they Continued on page 32
