Plaintiff In Voter ID Lawsuit Has Fought For Years To Prove Her Identity
By Cherri Gregg
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Several plaintiffs have stepped forward in the ACLU lawsuit against the Commonwealth over the new voter ID law (see related story).
One of the plaintiffs in the suit says she's spent the last 10 years trying to prove her identity.
"It's not fair. And all these years I've been voting and there hasn't been a problem," says 59-year-old Wilola Lee, who was born in McInyre, Georgia, a small town about 50 miles west of Macon.
Lee moved to the Germantown section of Philadelphia when she was five years old and has been voting for nearly 40 years. She says she may not be able to vote in November because she doesn't have a birth certificate.
READ: ACLU Files Lawsuit To Overturn Pa. Voter ID Law
"It just makes me feel as though sometimes I don't exist," she told KYW Newsradio. "(There are) a lot of things that I can't get, or if I want to travel, or if I want to open up a bank account, or anything. I can't get nothing."
Lee says she's spent ten years and hundreds of dollars petitioning the State of Georgia to get her birth certificate, without luck.
"I had to send a $10 fee every time I would write to them and try to get my birth certificate. And then they would write back to me and say they can't find it."
Lee says she received a delayed certificate with no seal, but PennDOT won't accept it.
"My son has tried to do the tracking and he spoke to them in Atlanta. And they said I would have to get a judge, go in front of a judge, so they can see who I am."
So now, she says, she has no choice but to sue for her right to vote.
