107-Year-Old Woman Who Danced With Obama Unable to Get Government-Issued ID

The elderly Washington, D.C., woman who went viral after being captured on video in February dancing gleefully with the Obamas is unable to get a government-issued photo ID, the Washington Post reports. 

According to columnist Courtland Milloy, in order for Virginia McLaurin to get her D.C. nondriver’s license photo ID, she needs a copy of her birth certificate from South Carolina, where she was born. However, in order to get that birth certificate, she needs a photo ID. McLaurin is basically caught in a never-ending bureaucratic cycle. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever get that face card,” McLaurin told Milloy. “I was birthed by a midwife and the birthday put in a Bible somewhere. I don’t know if they even had birth certificates back then.”

Luckily for McLaurin, the district doesn’t require a photo ID to vote, so she can still exercise her right to vote in the D.C. primary come June. The same can’t be said of other elderly citizens who live in states that have adopted restrictive voter-ID laws. 

“I’d pray long and hard to my God if they ever tried to do something like that to me,” McLaurin said.

She does not remember exactly when her identification was lost after her purse was snatched from her, but she does remember exactly what happened when it was taken. 

“I was standing on 16th Street, waiting for a bus, and these three fellows passed me in a car and went one block, then I saw two of them walking back together, like they were playing,” she said. “Before I knew anything, one of them had walked up to me and said, ‘I’ll take this.’ ”

“I didn’t get any of my things back,” she added. “Then I started putting off replacing them because I didn’t want to think about carrying around stuff that people would steal.”

McLaurin, who recently turned 107, actually got a temporary ID from the district to use when she leased an apartment last month. However, as her son Felipe Cardoso understands it, that identification cannot be used to obtain her birth certificate. 

“It’s sad to see my mother having to stand in lines, getting tired,” Cardoso said. “She can’t understand how her picture could be in all those newspapers and all over the Internet, how so many people could recognize her on the street and want to take selfies with her, and she can’t even get a photo ID.”

Read more at the Washington Post.