CNSNews.com reporter Pete Winn uses an Oct. 4 CNS blog post — even though the tone and structure are barely different from the “news” articles he writes — to make a big deal out of Viviette Applewhite, the 93-year-old woman who is the lead plaintiff in the fight against Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, got her state ID.
Winn notes that “she got her ID just one day after Pennsylvania Judge Robert Simpson initially upheld Pennsylvania’s voter ID law – the same law that Simpson put on hold Tuesday,” and he quotes only pro-voter ID conservatives to push the idea that the Pennsylvania law can’t possibly be that onerous if Appelwhite got one. Meanwhile, Winn sneeringly referred to “the liberal lawyers of the ACLU” and claimed he tried to contact them for his “story.”
But Winn largely ignores the fact that Applewhite has been trying to get such a state ID for years without success and that it was only after she became a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit that she did. The Associated Press reported that “she’d been rejected for years because she lacked appropriate documentation to receive the card.”
Winn goes on to quote one conservative activist questioning the ACLU’s claim that there are “thousands of Ms. Applewhites out there” who still don’t have ID, writing that “credible estimates place the number of people in Pennsylvania who may have difficulty getting a picture ID in the ‘hundreds, not thousands.'” Winn does not identify these supposedly “credible estimates.”
Meanwhile, one study estimates that 14.4 percent of eligible voters in Pennsylvania lack a valid form of photo identification under the new law.
Of course, Winn would ignored these very same facts had his blog post been a “news” story.