An 82-year-old woman passed away shortly after voting the first time in her life.
Gracie Lou Phillips of Texas died Monday after battling pneumonia. She had cast her ballot for the midterm elections Thursday, dragging her portable oxygen tank to a polling station in Grand Prairie, according to Dallas-Fort Worth news station NBC 5.
Phillips’s granddaughter Michelle Phillips told the station that her grandmother hadn’t voted before due to being busy and misinformed. “She finally registered to vote for the first time in her life,” said Michelle. “She kept telling everybody ‘I’m voting. I’m going to vote this year, and my vote counts.’”
“My aunt took her with her portable oxygen tank,” she said. “Poll people were very kind. They met her out at her car.”
Gracie’s family is proud of their matriarch for exercising her rights before she passed. “To have someone literally need oxygen to breathe, pure tank of oxygen to breathe, put it in her car and ask to go on what may very well be the last week of her life,” Michelle told NBC 5, “that shows the dedication and priority that people need to look at.”
“Her priority through life was her family,” granddaughter Leslie Rene Moore said.