Thankfully, word is that the heinous, disenfranchising,
election-rigging SAVE Act is unlikely to pass the Senate. Not for lack of
trying, though. Not only has TFG been furiously jumping up and down on levers of
power, trying to move Congress to nuke the filibuster to get this thing passed,
but the PR game has been ramped up. I’ve seen several memes hitting Facebook
via my conservative friends and their Conservative Media Bubble talking points,
claiming that A) it’s just a voter ID, and B) it’s no big deal to obtain the
required documents. Funny how it’s always “no big deal” for someone ELSE to
jump through hoops.
Naturally, they omit the vast problems with this bill, like the time and cost involved in the not-so-simple task of tracking down and obtaining long-lost documents or replacing ones that are no longer acceptable.
The part about how a married woman’s birth certificate is
no longer acceptable is particularly insidious. That’s a huge swath of
Americans who immediately become disenfranchised for doing absolutely nothing
wrong, other than taking their husband’s name (which is something Republicans
tend to want women to do).
Consider how the GOP created this standard, on purpose.
Why do you think that is? Tell me how it can be anything but the continued
devaluation of women because of their perceived bias toward voting Democratic.
(Which is a self-created problem due to their pursuit of limiting reproductive
rights. Maybe if they weren’t trying to limit women to being incubators, they
might have a better image in their eyes.)
So it’s not like it’s an oversight or something. In fact, they’ve had more than enough opportunities to remove that onerous requirement, but they’ve actively resisted doing so.
No, this is how they want it. They want fewer women to
vote.
They could also create a Voter ID plan that would garner public support if they created a simple means of obtaining a valid document. But they won’t do that either.
They’re even willing to disenfranchise their own base.
Look at how the SAVE Act affects red states:
Their stated basis for all of these new requirements is supposed to be about preventing voter fraud. That’s what they keep returning to in every argument: tall tales about illegal aliens affecting elections. This is the hollowest argument of all. There is no individual voter fraud in any statistically relevant case.
The only voter fraud found has been at the institutional
level: doctoring voting machines, “losing” or pre-filling ballots, and providing
incorrect details on where and when to vote. And this is in addition to the “soft”
voter-prevention techniques of limiting early voting, voting by mail or
drop-off, closing voting precincts, limiting hours, and threatening to have ICE
teams monitoring urban voting locations. On the latter point, they’ll SAY that
ICE is only looking for undocumented immigrants, but we have already seen
through that. They’re rounding up anyone who fits the visual or linguistic description.
If I were a legal immigrant, I wouldn’t go anywhere near a voting booth,
because I wouldn’t want to risk my freedom. And that’s exactly what they want.
And ALL of these voter suppression actions were taken by
Republicans. NONE of these things would be prevented by individual voter ID
requirements.
Despite there being practically zero voter fraud,
Republicans are insisting that a significant portion of our population wade through
months of red tape to acquire new documents, counting on the fact that many won’t
have the time or inclination.
This is what a political party does when they know their
message is not landing. And this group has entrenched itself in positions of
power, with no intentions of ever giving them up. Because they know that if
they do, many of them are going to jail, from the standard minions to the top
of the org chart.
There’s literally nothing they won’t do to prevent that from happening. Just look around.
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