Another Tennessee Voter ID FAIL

News-flash: we haven’t had a requirement that only property owners are eligible to vote since around 1850 or so. Someone might want to clue in employees at Tennessee’s Dept. of Safety, however:

Al Star, a Nashville homeless man, says he got the runaround from the Department of Safety when he attempted a few days before Thanksgiving to apply for a free state identification to vote, eventually having to call an aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper before receiving the ID.

Star, 59, says a clerk at the Department of Safety’s office in the Snodgrass building near the Capitol initially refused to issue him a free ID to replace his lost driver’s license, saying instead that he would have to pay $12 for a replacement. Star says he told the clerk that he no longer needed a driver’s license because he doesn’t own a car and had stated clearly on his application that he only wanted an ID to vote.

“She felt that I was homeless, which I am, and she didn’t want to help me with anything with the government,” he said. “She acted like, ‘Look at this, nobody’s going to help him out anyway, because he’s homeless.’”

Krissa Barclay, a Cooper aide who works in downtown Nashville, says she had to go up to the driver services center to convince the clerk to issue Star the ID. She told The Tennessean about Star’s case afterward.

Oh, good grief. Being homeless is not a crime, and it certainly doesn’t preclude ones right (or ability) to vote. This is just another in a string of failures for Tennessee’s Voter ID act. Yet the other side has yet to point to one real case of fraudulent voting that would have been prevented by this Voter ID law.