by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and designed by ALEC (.pdf). I'm sure that is comes as no surprise that Pennsylvania is considered one of the key battleground states in the upcoming election. Mrs. Applewhite, as an elderly African American Democratic Party member, hits the trifecta of demographics that this kind of legislation intends to prevent from voting. So Mrs. Applewhite is the perfect person to be the lead plaintiff suing against the Voter ID act:

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 suit seeks to overturn what it calls a "draconian" law, a measure the plaintiffs and their lawyers contend will lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters - including Applewhite.

"It stinks," she said in a video prepared by the ACLU and aired Tuesday at a news conference in the Capitol. "They are taking our rights away."

The suit was filed in Commonwealth Court on behalf of 10 plaintiffs, among them three elderly women who say they cannot obtain necessary ID because they were born in the Jim Crow South, where states have no records of their births.

"What we're not talking about here is just any right, we're talking about the right to vote," Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said at the news conference. "Two hundred years ago, we actually fought a war for this right. This is an extremely important right."

This is why we fight, why we can never stop fighting. If Republicans cannot attract voters on the strength of their ideas (and I think there's a good argument that they really can't) then they're going prevent people from voting on the other side.