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.