Ruth White finally has her passport, so she doesn't have to worry about Georgia's highly restrictive new rules for voting. But it was no simple task. Since White doesn't have a birth certificate, she didn't come by a passport easily.

White, 84, was born at home in Asheville, N.C. She says she wrote the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics several times to get a copy of her birth certificate, but the office finally told her there was no record of her birth. She then called the school records office in Washington, D.C., where she spent her childhood.

"Fortunately, the person who answered just happened to be the daughter of a very good friend of mine. So she sent the school records, which show my birth date," White said.

With that -- and $97 -- she was able to get her passport through an expedited process last November.

White was highly motivated. Her grandson was getting married in Jamaica, and she wanted to be able to attend. Besides, her daughter, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, was on the ballot for re-election on Nov. 8, and she wanted to vote for her.

But White was annoyed by the hassle, she said. At the post office where she filled out her passport application, she vented her frustration loudly enough for others to hear.

"I said, 'I was born in this country, I have been a citizen for 84 years, I have voted since I was old enough, and here they are worrying me to death about some ID in this state of Georgia.' Some people laughed, but, you know, at my age, sometimes you just let loose."

If White, a retired schoolteacher, were less educated or less persistent, she may never have acquired the documents that allow her to vote under Georgia's new law. While Gov. Sonny Perdue and his GOP colleagues recently passed a new version of the bill that they expect to pass court muster -- it makes the photo IDs free of charge -- it doesn't make the process any simpler for many elderly Georgians. (The GOP-dominated Legislature passed a very similar voter ID law last year, but a federal judge ruled that the law likely constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax.)

That's no doubt what the backers of the bill intended -- to discourage voters who would likely cast ballots for Democrats. Perdue and his Republican allies insist the law is merely an effort to prevent voter fraud, but that claim is laughable. As Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Alan Judd recently pointed out in a detailed story, most allegations of voting irregularities involve absentee ballots. And the new law makes it easier to cheat using an absentee ballot.

In fact, Georgia's voter ID bill, the most restrictive in the nation, is part of a national GOP effort to shave off small percentages of Democratic voters -- enough to make a difference in close races. In a prescient article in The New Yorker two years ago, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin outlined a host of now-familiar episodes in which Republicans intimidated voters of color. These included eyewitness testimony that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist harassed black and Latino voters at Arizona polls in the early 1960s, when he was a local GOP activist. Toobin also tracked the rise of a former Fulton County GOP regular named Hans A. von Spakovsky, who, in 1997, wrote a piece for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, calling for a campaign to purge rolls of unqualified voters. That led to the notorious purge in Florida in 2000, which mistakenly disenfranchised thousands of voters, many of them black, most of them Democrats. George W. Bush's narrow and disputed win was helped considerably by that purge.

Von Spakovsky's role in Bush's victory led him to a high-ranking post in the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section. There, he was able last year to overrule career lawyers who believed the new Georgia ID law should be not be approved. (Recently, Bush gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Elections Commission, where he can continue his campaign to suppress the minority vote.)

This year, the Legislature has put some lipstick and a little rouge on its pig of a voter ID law, hoping to sneak it past the courts. But the strategy behind the law remains the same: keep those from voting who don't look like us and don't think like us. That's definitely unconstitutional. And un-American, too.