82-year-old gets to vote for the first time days before her death

(Image credit: NBC DFW/Screenshot)

published 6 November 2018

An 82-year-old Texas woman named Gracie Lou Phillips voted for the first time in her life Thursday before dying in hospice care Monday.

Phillips had never voted before due to a focus on family life and misconceptions about political participation, said her granddaughter, Leslie Rene Moore, but she wanted to push back on the hostility of modern politics. With a family member's aid, she went to a polling station for early voting, oxygen tank in tow, and was able to vote curbside with the help of election volunteers.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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