Yesterday, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Law Center, the Homeless Advocacy Project, and others, filed suit against Tom Corbett to stop Pennsylvania's voter ID law:

HARRISBURG - Wartime welder, civil-rights marcher, world traveler, voter - Viviette Applewhite of Philadelphia's Germantown section can boast of having been all those things.

On Tuesday, she added another title: plaintiff.

Applewhite, who is 93 and uses a wheelchair, became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed here in state court by the ACLU and the NAACP challenging Pennsylvania's new law requiring voters to produce a driver's license or other photo identification before they are allowed to vote.

The complaint (pdf) details in heartbreaking detail the stories of a number of people-- especially the elderly-- who, quite simply, will no longer be allowed to vote, come November.

9. Petitioner Viviette Applewhite, a registered voter in Pennsylvania, is a 92-yearold African-American woman born in 1919 in Philadelphia. A graduate of Germantown High School, Ms. Applewhite worked as a welder during World War II in the Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania. She thereafter worked in hotels in Chicago and Philadelphia. Ms. Applewhite married and raised a daughter who for decades worked for various federal, Pennsylvania, and municipal government agencies. Now a widow, Ms. Applewhite has lived in Philadelphia for much of her life, including the past twenty years, and enjoys five grandchildren, nine great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.

10. Voting is extremely important to Ms. Applewhite, and she has voted in nearly every election since at least 1960. Ms. Applewhite marched to support civil rights for AfricanAmericans with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Macon, Georgia, and traveled on several occasions to hear him preach in Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church.

11. Ms. Applewhite has never driven a car and thus has never had a driver’s license. Many years ago her purse, in which she carried her important documents, was stolen. She has attempted on at least three occasions to order a birth certificate from Pennsylvania’s Division of Vital Records. Despite paying the fee to obtain a birth certificate, she has never received one.
She recently engaged a lawyer, who is trying yet again to obtain her birth certificate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

12. Since Ms. Applewhite does not have and has been unable to obtain photo identification required by Pennsylvania’s Photo ID Law, after voting in nearly every election for more than 50 years, she will no longer be able to vote beginning in November.

The ACLU has also posted a number of videos.

The complaint is beautifully written, heartbreaking, and outrage inducing, and it will pretty clearly lay out just how horrible this law is. See more info about it here.