#and ​i can’t schedule a personal appointment bc they’re not available for this class (or any engineering classes)

[pallases]

engineering tutoring session room is once again abandoned 😐🔪

[nightfallwolfkin]

Why Voter ID Equals Voter Suppression

This was written by a close friend from her own personal experience. --------------------------------------------- Oh hey. Someone's tweet just reminded me of something. #voterID #VoterSuppression My mom's 70-something. She's been married to my dad, a retired Army warrant officer, for 50+ years. She's had numerous jobs, been overseas several times, had a driver's license since she was 16.

She's volunteered at the VA medical facility, worked at the polling stations every election (big & small) for about a decade, has had numerous bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages, etc. Her current driver's license (exp 2022) doesn't have the "Real ID" marker on it.

She has a friend whose son is pretty high up in the DMV; he assured her she could do it all online. She's not internet savvy, so I got her info & tried to do it. Everything said she was eligible to renew/update her DL online, but when I tried to finalize it, it was rejected.

So I took a day off of work one day and went with her to the DMV to find out what's going on. Except we couldn't find out, because the DMV isn't letting anyone in, not even to ask a question, unless they have an appointment. You have to schedule the appointment online.

Remember, my mom's not tech-savvy. She can do a few things, but not a lot, and between her own innate irritability and the stresses of caring for my dad, she simply doesn't have the patience for it. So I went online to schedule the appointment. Except I couldn't.

They only book two weeks out at a time; all the available appointments were filled. The website said to try again on such-and-such a day, so I did. Same thing. All booked up. I took some more time away from my own work to go with her to talk to the lady turning people away.

We asked if we were doing something wrong. No, she said, it's just really hard to get an appointment right now. Try logging on at like 12:01AM on the next available day. My mom's usually sweet to other people, but on occasion she can talk to them the way she talks to me lol.

It's very effective, and the lady whose job it was to turn people away agreed to go inside and pull some strings and got my mom and appointment for three weeks away. By now we've been trying to get her a new driver's license for about two months.

The lady tells us we have to bring her birth certificate to prove that she's a US citizen. My mom scoffs and says they've never needed that before. Well, they need it now. Three weeks later there's a bit of a panic when we can't find her birth certificate.

She insists on trying to get my dad to help her look for it, despite the fact that he has raging dementia. He goes through all the folders in a file cabinet three times and swears it's not there, while she tears up the rest of the house. I've taken another day away from work.

I tell them to leave and get something to eat, and I'll look for it. I don't think my dad actually knows what he's looking for. He and she both insist that if it was in that cabinet, he would have found it. "Humor me," I say. They leave to go get lunch.

They walk out the door, I open the file cabinet, and look at some manila envelopes right in the middle. I pick one up. Printed on the front of it in ~36-point font is 'BIRTH CERTIFICATES' followed by the names of everyone in our family. I call my mom and tell her to relax.

We get to the DMV a half hour ahead of time. I check in online - another thing that my mom couldn't figure out how to do - and then I go stand in line while she sits with my dad in the car. The Go-Away lady comes out, confirms our appointment, then asks for the birth cert.

I hand it over. She looks at it and says, "No, her birth CERTIFICATE." I look at the document. She says, "This is a Certification of Birth Registration*. It's not a birth certificate." health.maryland.gov/vsa/Pages/cert… *or something like that

I look at it, puzzled. It says 'birth' and 'certificat-' something; surely that's the same thing. No, she says; this is just a paper saying that the official birth certificate was processed. "This is the only thing she's ever used," I say. "The military, her passports -"

"Does she have a current passport? We can use that." "Well, no, she hasn't needed one for like 30 years. How come all of a sudden this - which has been perfectly fine for her entire life in NUMEROUS states and countries - isn't sufficient?" "They changed the requirements."

The Go-Away lady tells me we'll have to request a certified copy of the BC, and then start the entire process over again. I get a link to a company that processes the requests, but they charge $10 for the BC, and $11.75 for their processing fee.

To hell with that, I think, I'll go directly to the Vital Records people in Maryland. They charge the same thing, because they want you to use the internet company. You can request it by mail, by... wait for it... downloading a form from the internet. health.maryland.gov/vsa/Pages/birt…

So basically you can do it on the internet, or on the internet, and if you don't have access to the internet or don't know how to do stuff like "download a PDF" well, tough noogies for you. But that's what I'm here for. So I go back to the company and fill out all the info.

They're asking for some weird stuff to verify her identity: "Which of these properties is associated with you? A, B, C, D, E, or none of the above?" My mom immediately goes into a panic because those are all strange addresses to her. "Somebody must be using my SSN!"

I try to explain to her that knowing that you've never been at ANY of those places is confirmation as much as knowing you've been at this or that one. She doesn't understand it, and she's almost in tears. I tell her to just trust me, it's fine. We finish that, and move on.

We get to the checkout part and guess what? They don't have an option to just send it regular mail (or not that I could find). Your only "option" for shipping is express mail, for $18+. That brings the total cost to $40-something. And it's going to take 3-4 weeks.

In addition to the ~2 months we've already been waiting. If you add everything all up, by the time we're done it'll probably "cost" ~$500 to get her driver's license renewed. (That's counting my time at my full rate; even if you just count it at minimum wage, it's easily over $150.) And that's just the things we can put a price on - gas, hours away from (my) work, actual costs. It doesn't count the hours staying up until midnight to try to get an appointment or the frustration (for her) of not being able to talk to a human.

It doesn't count the stress she feels hoping my dad's not deciding to walk into traffic or burn the house down, since he's not allowed to come in to the DMV office with her and has to wait outside/at home, or the guilt she feels about relying on me for all this.

And altogether it'll probably take us 4 months minimum to simply renew a driver's license to put a little star on it. (The lack of birth certificate is why she couldn't do it online, btw.) And consider this: My mom's an intelligent, middle-class, white cishet woman.

She has a car, she has internet access (though she doesn't know how to use it), she's fluent in English, she's worked outside the home for decades and, as a former military wife and government employee, understands paperwork and bureaucracy.

She doesn't have a criminal record, she doesn't move around often (or at all), she has perfect credit and plenty of credit cards to pay for things online - she should be the easiest person in the entire damn world to renew a driver's license for. And it was (is) HARD.

Anyone who thinks getting "suitable" ID is a walk in the park needs to pull their head out of their ass. For someone with disabilities, living in poverty, without a permanent address, unfamiliar with bureaucracy, limited access to the internet, someone whose appearance doesn’t match the name on their ID or birth certificate, someone who doesn't have a credit card and pays cash for everything - imagine.

Imagine how fucking hard it would be for a single parent who speaks limited English (and YES, there are plenty of natural-born US citizens who don't speak English), or doesn't have a car. For someone who's not the gender they were assigned at birth. For someone who hasn't had $40 to spare in years. For someone with a learning disability. For thousands of other people. It's bullshit, is what it is. (sorry so long.)