Trump did his civic duty by voting by mail, even if he doesn’t want you to because that’s cheating. Following up on his debunked conspiracy delusion that the 2020 election was “rigged” and stolen from him, Trump has told congressional Republicans to make no deal to fund the Transportation Safety Administration, and thereby end the hours of waiting on line at airports, unless the SAVE Act is passed
.“I’m suggesting strongly to the Republican Party, don’t make any deal on anything,” Mr. Trump said during a crime reduction event in Memphis.
He suggested that he would use the standoff over funding for the Department of Homeland Security as leverage to pass his voter ID bill, which he says is necessary to combat voter fraud by noncitizens — something that is exceedingly rare.
“Don’t make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID,” Mr. Trump said, referring to a bill that he calls the SAVE America Act.
Who wouldn’t want to SAVE America? Who doesn’t want fair elections? What could possibly be the problem? Chuck Schumer provided a surprisingly decent explanation of the issue.
Republicans like to pretend that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill. Though on the surface it appears to be one, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans. In the bill, voter ID comes into play only at the very end of a process designed to systematically disenfranchise Americans.
It’s not entirely clear that the disenfranchised Americans would necessarily be Dem or Rep voters. Of course, it could be manipulated by directing it at certain cities or states that tend to vote blue rather than red, but the mechanics of the bill suggest that it could effect voters without regard to their politics.
This purge would begin with the Department of Homeland Security. Under the SAVE Act, every state would be required to turn over its voter rolls to the department — an extraordinary federal intrusion into the state administration of elections. It would hand Washington control over voter eligibility, something Democratic- and Republican-led states have long resisted.
The next step would involve running the voter rolls through an algorithm that would ostensibly root out noncitizens — a program overhauled by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has already proved dangerously unreliable. In a trial run of the program in Boone County, Mo., more than half of the voters flagged as ineligible were, in fact, eligible American citizens. County clerks in Texas also found many examples of wrongly identified voters. Citizens were removed from the voter rolls anyway.
The third step would be to leave purged voters in the dark about what has happened. Under the SAVE Act, if you are purged from voter rolls by the federal government, you may not know that this has occurred until you show up to vote. The bill imposes no requirement that voters be notified if they are purged. Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the country on Election Day. It would be pandemonium.
Last, the bill would impose voter ID requirements — not as a safeguard against fraud, but as another barrier to voting. For those who had been wrongfully purged from voter rolls, the SAVE Act would make registering again a bureaucratic nightmare. No longer would a driver’s license or another state-sanctioned identification suffice. They would instead have to produce a passport (which only about half of Americans have) or a birth certificate (which many cannot easily access). For a married woman who changed her surname, and whose married name doesn’t match the one on her birth certificate, even a birth certificate may not be enough. Some 20 million American citizens lack the required documents to prove citizenship under the SAVE Act.
On top of these changes, no longer would motor voter or other voter registration conveniences be allowed. In order to register to vote, people would have to physically appear at election offices to prove their citizenship. Many people would find this to be more onerous than it’s worth, and not bother to register at all.
Requiring identification from voters is a popular idea, even if the fringe left argues it’s too much of a burden to expect poor people to have any government issued ID. While there may be some for whom an ID is too much of a burden, it strains credulity to believe that having a legit ID is too much to ask of a voter given how ubiquitous government-issued IDs have become. Nor is it too much to ask that a person display their ID before voting to assure that they are the person they claim to be. But that’s not what the SAVE Act is about, even though that’s the way it’s being sold.
Even with the SAVE Act, most of us would be able to register and vote. Then again, if the act prevented even one percent of voters from exercising their franchise, it would mean more than 1.6 million Americans would be disenfranchised. That’s a lot of citizens whose right to vote has been denied them.
Is the SAVE Act a good idea? Should it be enacted? Should funding TSA and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security be held captive to passing the SAVE Act? Should Congress refuse to enact any laws until Trump gets his way, which he asserts is the only way the Republicans are guaranteed to win the midterms?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply, within reason.
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Twofer Tuesday.
Howl,
Taking advantage of Tuesday Talk rules, and perhaps our host’s patience, I thought of you when I encountered this a few days ago;
Don Was and his Pan Detroit Ensemble. Great musicians, doing some of my favorite music and sung by a woman with an especially pleasant voice and interesting delivery.
Happy Tuesday!
Thanks, Hal! Hadn’t seen that before.
As someone who has to obtain and show ID, undergo a background check (paying a fee to do so), AND can only work with Federally authorized parties in order to exercise my Constitutionally-guaranteed right to keep and bear (purchase and carry) arms, my sympathy meter on this one runs a bit low.
Hand-marked ballots, counted in public. The gold standard for voting.
Be glad you have no difficulty proving you are a citizen and eligible to do the things you do, including voting. There are millions of people who have no idea how to get the documents required by the SAVE Act. Are you willing to provide assistance to those people?
As for hand counting, I use the example of Harris County, Texas, where Houston is. For the 2024 General Election, we had over 1.4 million ballots cast and the average number of races was something like 85. There is no way you can hand count that many ballots with that many races in a reasonable amount of time.
If it’s a constitutional right, and I agree that it is, then you should be pushing to go the other way and make it easier to purchase, carry, own or whatever firearms.
Make it more difficult for something else because your cause is a pain to go with is the wrong way to look at this.
Make it the same requirements to keep and bear arms and to vote.
To overly romanticize it, every law is backed up by the threat of force. That is how court judgments function. If the sheriff won’t physically enforce a writ of eviction, the writ is a dead letter.
The enumerated right is encumbered (in my state) by a background check with a fee. That has to be scheduled in one of a few offices in somewhat inconvenient locations. References as to good character and review by the local police are required..
If these are reasonable requirements, they are just as reasonable to impose on the people who will decide who is the DA and who is the sheriff, to mention a couple of officials who are involved with government application of force.
I know, Harper says one way about voting and Bruen says the other about firearms.
I get what you and The Oregon guy are getting at. I am arguing make the one that is more difficult easier, instead of making the other harder. They are both a right and there should be very limited requirements.
I think we are on the same side, but looking at it from opposite sides? I think?
Proof of citizenship makes no sense. The government already knows who is a citizen. Why should people get documents from the government only to submit them to the same government in order to vote?
Voter ID is ok only if: 1) The government makes sure that everyone has easy access to free IDs and 2) the list of IDs accepted is very broad. Student ID, work ID, transit ID, and any other ID that has a photo should be allowed.
The rest of the bill is naked voter suppression.
I wonder how many of who extol the virtues of hand-counted ballots have ever actually counted ballots. I have. It’s a mind-numbing, incredibly inefficient task. By the time you’re a hundred ballots in, you’re on autopilot. Smith, Jones, Jones, Jones, Smith …. Would I lay money that I got them 100% right? No way! Simply separating a heap of ballots into piles of 50 may take multiple tries to get right.
Hand-marked, hand-countable ballots that can be viewed, reviewed, randomly audited, recounted — of course. But my experience says that relying on a hand count for your basic results is not a great solution.
“The government already knows who is a citizen.”
Do they?
Anyway, that’s not the point, which is, who, exactly, is the person to whom you are about to hand a ballot?
In Mexico, you have to show picture ID to vote. The picture you present is compared to the picture on the precinct list.
Somehow, Mexico manages to hold elections. They must be much smarter than us.
[Ed. Note: You really should read the post before commenting so you don’t look like a blithering idiot.]
With ICE and the hostile environment Trump has created in this country for illegal immigrants, as well as non-citizens, who in their right mind would ever attempt to vote in an election if you were from one of those groups? Even before our current climate, non-citizens/illegal immigrant voting is so extremely rare to be statistically insignificant. So what is this really about?
It is obvious that the SAVE act is a blatant attempt by one political party to disenfranchise a large swath of the population in order to try and game the outcome in its favor. To make it harder to perform a constitutional right in the hopes it will disproportionately impact the other political party’s voters.
Just because states and the federal government make it harder to exercise one constitutional right is not a sound argument in favor of them doing the same to another right. Also, one of those rights can’t kill people (although the 44 detainees to die in ICE/DHS custody since Trump was sworn in might disagree).
No matter your political persuasion, the SAVE act is such a bureaucratic nightmare that if you support it, you should take a hard look in the mirror since you clearly do not value the constitution or the principals this country stands for.
“ Just because states and the federal government make it harder to exercise one constitutional right is not a sound argument in favor of them doing the same to another right. Also, one of those rights can’t kill people…”
Assuming you’re referring to the comments above regarding the 2A/ RKBA above, this is a facile and specious claim for a number of reasons, not least as there are more than a dozen studies and polls (from the NIJ, Pew, Gallup, the LA Times, etc.), that show defensive gun use occurs more often than criminal gun use.