“Trial to start in lawsuit over North Carolina’s voter-ID law”

WaPo:

Rosanell Eaton still remembers the day 70 years ago when she traveled two hours with her mother in a mule-drawn wagon to register to vote at the county courthouse. Before she could, she was forced to take a literacy test.

“What are you here for, little lady?” Eaton recalls a man at the courthouse asking her. When she told him, he instructed her, “Don’t miss a word, and speak the preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America.”

“Without missing a word, I did it,” she said.

Now 94, the North Carolina resident has voted in every election since and worked to register thousands of others to cast their own ballots. But last year, because of a new state voting law, Eaton said she and her daughter had to make 10 trips to the Division of Motor Vehicles, drive more than 200 miles and spend more than 20 hours to obtain one of the required forms of voter identification because the name on her identifying document, her driver’s license, did not exactly match that on her voter registration.

The photo ID rules — part of one of the strictest voting laws in the country — will go on trial in a federal courthouse Monday in the first battle over the ballot this presidential year.

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