Virginia Politics

Augustine Carter’s Kafkaesque struggle to vote in 2012 in Virginia

More great work by my friends Eric Byler and Annabel Park from their series: The Story of America: A Nation Divided. If you appreciate the work Annabel and Eric are doing and would like to support them, please donate here. Thanks. Augustine Carter, an 85-year-old voter in Richmond, tells her story of the trouble she went through to vote in 2012. Born in 1928, she never had a birth certificate and she never got a driver's license because she decided years ago that driving wasn't for her. Her baptism certificate was sufficient for all identification purposes until the 2012 election. She had to go through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy including being told by someone at the Motor Vehicle Administration that she couldn't prove that she was not a terrorist. This video was shot in Richmond on January 29th at the Virginia State Capitol building at a rally organized by the Virginia State Assembly's black caucus. Augustine Carter was invited to tell her story to illustrate that the new bills currently proposed by Republican lawmakers would actually make these problems even worse. One bill in particular would make current voter ID laws which created such problems for Carter even stricter. This bill is scheduled for a vote in the state senate on Monday... Video by Eric Byler and Annabel Park



More great work by my friends Eric Byler and Annabel Park from their series: The Story of America: A Nation Divided. If you appreciate the work Annabel and Eric are doing and would like to support them, please donate here. Thanks.

Augustine Carter, an 85-year-old voter in Richmond, tells her story of the trouble she went through to vote in 2012. Born in 1928, she never had a birth certificate and she never got a driver’s license because she decided years ago that driving wasn’t for her. Her baptism certificate was sufficient for all identification purposes until the 2012 election. She had to go through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy including being told by someone at the Motor Vehicle Administration that she couldn’t prove that she was not a terrorist.

This video was shot in Richmond on January 29th at the Virginia State Capitol building at a rally organized by the Virginia State Assembly’s black caucus. Augustine Carter was invited to tell her story to illustrate that the new bills currently proposed by Republican lawmakers would actually make these problems even worse. One bill in particular would make current voter ID laws which created such problems for Carter even stricter. This bill is scheduled for a vote in the state senate on Monday…

Video by Eric Byler and Annabel Park

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