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To Cement One-Party Control, MAGA Republicans Pushing Through SAVE Act [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
By Karen Rubin,
[email protected], news-photos-features.com
Despite the fact that United States is predicated on the ability of people to elect their own representatives, the United States already has deplorably low turnout in voting – and likely is what sent Trump to White House not once but twice. Republicans are now pushing through the SAVE Act to put more obstacles in the way of voters reaching the ballot box and having their votes counted to insure one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
Republicans have realized since 2000 the benefits of suppressing votes, purging voters, playing with the count (including rejecting votes) – leading to reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. After Obama’s win in 2008, they went to work in earnest to suppress voting using such techniques as placing voting places off-campus and hard-to-reach places, making people (even 102-year olds) wait hours on line, having too few voting machines or paper ballots, purging voter rolls without giving voters recourse, making it hard to register to vote, and challenging ballots.
By 2020’s election, in the midst of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, they attacked mail-in-ballots, and did all they could to disrupt their delivery, count and certification, attempting to turnover the election in 60 separate lawsuits. And after that failed, Trump tried to extort election officials to change the count, threatened the Vice President to reject certification, and sent thousands to a deadly insurrection at the Capitol.
There’s no question that these tactics – with an assist from Russians who phoned in bomb threats to Democratic-leaning polling places - enabled Trump to slip through three swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to win the Electoral College.
After Biden’s historic win in 2020, they went to work again – making it illegal to give water or food to people waiting on line to vote, refining their tactics of purging voter lists, rejecting reforms, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that would affirm every eligible American citizen the right to vote and to ease access to the ballot.
Can’t have that. Can’t have “those” people actually voting or having their vote counted.
And they are aided in their crusade to turn America into a White Christo Fascist Nationalist Oligarch autocracy by the Imperial Supremes on the Supreme Court, who eroded free and fair elections beginning in 2000 by selecting George W. Bush over Al Gore (who actually won Florida and should have won the Electoral College), then the 2010 Citizens United decision which effectively turned cash into speech and power and the ability to buy politicians, policy and elections and giving Elon Musk the ability to buy the government for a mere $250 million, then attacking the Voting Rights Act, giving the Jim Crow states the ability to gerrymander to retain control of Congress, and now, actually poised to render the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional altogether, giving free rein to cut out whole groups from elected the representatives of their choice.
So now the MAGA Republicans are ramming through Congress the SAVE Act (more properly the SAVE THEIR CORRUPT ASSES Act) – so if Democrats think they can just wait it out until 2026 midterms, they are delusional, because the plan is for MAGA to keep control by hook or by crook.
The Orwellian named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would require everyone to provide proof of citizenship when registering or re-registering to vote by presenting a passport or birth certificate. As a result, millions of currently eligible voters would be disenfranchised and future generations disincentivized and blocked from voting.
According to Moveon.org, 21 million U.S. citizens of voting age do not have proof of citizenship readily available, only about half of American adults have a passport, and millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate, which under the SAVE Act, would jeopardize their ability to vote.
More specifically, the SAVE Act is targeted at disenfranchising women: tens of millions of people, primarily women, who changed their last name after getting married could be disenfranchised because their name no longer matches their birth certificate. This tactic has already been used to block women in places like Texas (groundzero for women’s enslavement) which require an ID to vote, where the name on the driver’s license does not match the birth certificate. Instead of accepting the marriage certificate, where a woman can adopt the new name, they require the woman to go through a court process to legally change their name.
It is particularly villainous considering that the TrumpMuskDOGE is closing offices, firing staff so it will be very difficult to obtain documents. They have put in requirements so that a transgender person will no longer be able to even obtain a passport since their sex would not conform with their birth certificate.
“Do you know where your birth certificate is?,” Moveon writes. “If you're married and changed your last name, does your birth certificate or passport match your new name? Have you ever experienced a natural disaster and had your documents destroyed? Have you recently moved and changed your address? Like millions of other Americans, are you so strapped between work, child care, and other obligations that taking the time to find or obtain new documents just isn't in the cards at a moment's notice when it's time to vote? These are just some of the conditions that could block millions of people from voting under this legislation.”
One of the reasons voter turnout by young people is so low is because of the difficulty of registering and reregistering when these people relocate – after graduating college, getting a new job, getting a new home, then another new job. The rules for registering also vary so much – and whether people can vote at the last place they have registered. (It is likely also why the numbers of voters doesn’t match the registration because when people re-register, they are not necessarily removed from the previous voting roll, which Trumpers have used to argue “voter fraud.”)
From Moveon.org:
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