Texas has some solid citizens, including Mary Lou Miller, who turned 21 in 1934 and has proudly voted ever since. This year, Mrs. Miller applied for a vote-by-mail ballot but forgot that she'd recently changed her residence. The county sent her ballot to her old address, but as ballots are not forwarded, she did not receive it. When she discovered that she needed to re-register, she went down to the county clerk's office to fill out a new poll card, where she was asked to provide a government-issued photo ID.
She had no driver's license, for she gave up driving in her early 80s (she's 101 now), and she had no other government-issued photo ID card. So she found a ride to an office of the Texas Department of Public Safety, where she could apply for a photo identification card -- except that she didn't have a recent driver's license, a passport,military identification (the army isn't a haven for centenarians), or sufficient alternate identification to qualify. (One form of acceptable identification is called a "parole document," something that a person gets when released early from prison after doing time for a crime. She told her story well to the San Antonio newspaper: here's where you can read her own words.
Delicious Texan irony! If only Mrs. Miller had committed a petty crime and been granted parole, she would have received a "parole document," one of the forms of identification that Texas will accept. So if she had forged a voter ID card (a crime), pleaded guilty, and been released on parole, Texas would have given her the ID that she needs to vote.
She can't be the only Texan caught in this situation: too old to have a current photo ID, and too honest to have been paroled. An enterprising county could provide a public service to the aged and patriotic: set up, perhaps, a junker car owned by some stranger, provide some spray paint, invite senior citizens to spray the car in violation of Section 28.08 of the Texas Penal Code, and have a judge on hand to accept the oldsters' guilty pleas, sentence them to two hours in jail, and immediately parole them. Each stalwart citizen would then have a parole document, which they could then use to register to vote. The junker cars could be auctioned off afterwards as pieces of performance art, which might bring in enough money to pay for the whole program.