Nuns on the run
By Leonard Doyle
Twelve Indiana sisters in their 80s and 90s who have been voting all their lives and who showed up to vote (for Hillary?) yesterday were turned away disappointed from a polling place because they did not have a photo ID. What were the authorities thinking, that the convent was a hotbed of voter impersonation? The irony is that the sisters were turned away by a fellow nun Julie McGuire. The members of Saint Mary's Convent in South Bendhad been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote. But true to the headstrong tradition of the nuns, they came to vote anyway, including one aged 98.
Some had outdated passports, none had driver licences, but it was no dice in Indiana which has the strictest photo ID law in the country. Now the convent is going to make a "very concerted effort" to get proper ids for the nuns in time for the November election. They are going to take from now until November to get them out and get this done. The Republicans changed the law in what they claimed was a bid to combat voter fraud - although no case involving someone impersonating a voter at the polls has ever been prosecuted in Indiana. In fact many believe the strict ID law is about preventing lower income people, many of them black and democratic leaning, from voting in the presidential election.
"Here's the supreme irony," said John Borkowski, a an election watchdog for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can't be accepted by a bunch of nuns... who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don't have an ID."
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