My mother, born in Texas in 1916, never had a birth certificate. She had a driver's license, issued in Oklahoma in 1932, but didn't need a birth certificate to get it. Her name was misread by the typist who filled out my birth certificate. My parents were divorced and she remarried a young soldier in 1940. He recorded the marriage with the military but reversed the order of her first and middle names.
When I entered school in 1943, I used my stepfather's name, but I wasn't adopted until 1946. The school didn't care. Their job was education.
When I married, my wife took my adopted name but always went by her middle name rather than her first name. That was never a problem, through my thirty year naval career. She eventually started going by her middle name as her first name and her maiden name as her middle name. That worked just fine for a very long time. Then government bureaucrats started getting all hinckey about names and decided to start using driver's licenses as the equivalent of an internal passport ("carte d'identite) like other national governments issue.
My sister (first name Elizabeth) got caught up in the naming hysteria when the IRS complained that her pay checks, W-2's, etc. were made out to "Betty."
Every one of these perfectly innocent circumstances can lead to problems under the "real identity" laws.
Now Department of Motor Vehicles insist that every document give exactly the same version of the name. I might point out that this has absolutely no connection with whether the holder of a driver's license can safely operate a motor vehicle.
This is a frequent problem for women. Here is a recent article in the New York Times summarizing the problems for a woman who kept her unmarried name for professional purposes and uses her married name for private and family purposes.
This set of issues has now been brought into the artificial hysteria of voter ID. Republicans, who want to destroy the credibility of elections (when the "wrong" people win) levy charges of major discrepancies in voter registration - it must be fraud. These charges are usually based on computer matching programs, and on close (and expensive) investigation by boards of election, it turns out there is no fraud at all.
North Carolina Governor Pat McRory recently asserted that we need all these changes to voting procedures to "close loopholes that allow a voter to vote two or three times." There are no such loopholes.
In 2008 in North Carolina, more citizens cast votes than ever before - more than four million. North Carolina has an extensive set of safeguards and has its own computer matching system to uncover double voting. In 2008, the State Board of Elections uncovered 18 cases of double voting. On investigation, only one was found to be intentional and that case was prosecuted.
In a more recent case, a voter cast his ballot at one of his county's one-stop sites. Subsequently he realized he had not completed the reverse side of the ballot. So on election day, he went to his normal precinct and cast a ballot only on the reverse side. He was caught and prosecuted.
Since passage of the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, registration records in all states have vastly improved. North Carolina's records are among the nation's best.
Don't be hoodwinked. There is no election day voter fraud in North Carolina.
I'll have more to say later.
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Naming can become exponentially more problematic for immigrant U.S. citizens and their U.S. citizen progeny.
In the Spanish-speaking world, folks are given a Patronymic (from the father) and Matronymic (from the mother) names, reflecting the family names of both their father and their mother...
And both the mother and the father, of course, each carry their own patronymic and matronymic surnames...
The FIRST surname of any of these persons is the FIRST surname of their father, while their SECOND surname is the FIRST surname of their mother.
For instance, a Juan Quinones Garza (son of Pedro Quinones Alvara and Maria Garza Cervantes) marries Rosa Garcia Alvarez (daughter of Franciso Garcia Benitez and Estella Alvarez Acosta)... when they have a son, they name him Xavier Quinones Garcia... Xavier eventually marries Maria Batista Campo, and they have a daughter who is then named Eva Quinones Batista.
You would think career employees of the U.S. Immigration & Naturalization service would be used to, and understand, this Hispanic heritage naming convention, but boy, lemme tell you, they don't. They look to see what name is at the end, and put that in the form as the Family name. Even though it is actually the name which comes from the person's mother (which came in turn from that mother's father.)
This can often often lead to huge, expensive, lawyer-hiring, years-long efforts to correct processing cluster-*ucks within the world of professional immigration bureucrats, even resulting in completely un-founded commencements of removal (deportation) proceedings. It also often leads to mix-ups for those who eventually receive U.S. Citizenship and their offspring in obtaining Driver Licenses, managing banking accounts, processing paychecks, visiting family in hospitals, etc. etc. etc.
Is it possible that this will now also lead to widespread denial of voting rights to Hispanic families who have lawfully entered the U.S. and obtained citizenship, and their U.S.-born (and born of U.S. citizen) descendents?
Or even those Hispanics descended, not from anyone who crossed the U.S. border, but from folks whose centuries-old homes were crossed by the expanding U.S. borders?
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