Dorothy Cooper, left, signs paperwork before voting Tuesday morning at the Westside voting station at Boynton Terrace in Chattanooga. Cooper made national news last year when she struggled to get identification due to a previous marital name change.Dorothy Cooper, the 96-year-old Chattanooga woman who gained national attention as the face of the photo ID voting issue, has gone nationwide again. Or at least her story has.
HBO's critically acclaimed series "The Newsroom," wrote Cooper and her story into its finale, which aired Sunday night. The fictional show is based on a network news program.
Cooper is identified by name by fictional anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels on the show. He tells his television audience that Dorothy Cooper is a woman from Tennessee who cannot vote because she doesn't have a valid ID. He adds that 20 million people in the country do not have government-issued IDs and will therefore not be able to vote.
In the episode, which is told through flashbacks, Daniels' character learns of Cooper's story through her great niece, who is his nurse, according to a recap of the show on www.tvrage.com. He is in the hospital after being found bleeding on his bathroom floor.
A Chattanooga Times Free Press story from earlier this year reported that Cooper did vote in a recent election, as she has done since the 1940s.