Anyone who pays any attention at all to American politics knows that Republicans want to restrict voting by people who they believe will vote against them – and today that includes, on most issues, over half of our citizens.
Republicans know that their programs which favor the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, the poor, and certain minority groups, are never going to attract enough voters for them to win. Polling data currently supports that conclusion. Their solution? Restrict the voting rights of Americans likely to support Democrats at election time.
Weakening the Voting Rights Act
Given this situation, it is understandable that Republicans, especially now that MAGA is in charge, would try to weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This act destroyed the remnants of the Jim Crow voting restrictions that still existed in some southern states.
Prior to the Voting Rights Act, Blacks could be required to take literacy tests or pay a poll tax in order to vote. This act outlawed practices that restricted the right of voting by people of color in any election, local, state, or federal, throughout the United States.
What really irritated many Republicans, including a young Reagan administration attorney named John Roberts, was the fact that the U.S. Attorney General could appoint federal examiners to monitor elections in places where there had been discrimination in the past. Even worse, in GOP eyes, was a requirement that made states with a history of discrimination get a clearance from Washington before changing any voting laws.
This last requirement was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, becoming the first blow against protection of minority voting provided in the Voting Rights Act. Republicans argued disingenuously that there was no longer a need for this protection since discrimination against minorities had ended.
Giving the green light to gerrymandering
More recently, the Supreme Court, now with John Roberts as Chief Justice, decided that they had no authority to stop states from partisan gerrymandering of districts such as seen recently in Texas, but also in other states, controlled by Democrats and Republicans after every ten-year census to make it easier for their party to win Congressional seats.
But now the gloves have been taken off. Republicans are no longer subtle in hiding their desire to restrict voting. Donald Trump said several years ago that without such restrictions, Republicans could not win any more elections. He also loudly and repeatedly accused states he lost in 2020 of fraud, even allowing a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden.
And now – the SAVE Act
And now we have the SAVE (Safeguard Voter Eligibility Act), passed by the House of Representatives on April 10th of this year. If passed by the Senate, this will require proof of citizenship – and an old-fashioned driver’s license would no longer suffice. You would need to bring a passport, a U.S birth certificate, or a REAL ID license in order to vote.
Do you have a REAL ID license yet? Do you have a passport, or know where it is? Do you have a copy of your birth certificate handy? When your son or daughter calls to tell you that she needs one to vote in her new home in Texas, do you know where you put their birth certificates?
How many solid American citizens will be denied the right to vote?
States can provide a secondary process for those who don’t have one of these documents, but it doesn’t require much imagination to see how restrictive this process could be in some states.
And beyond that, states would be required to take “affirmative steps” to identify and purge non-citizens from voting rolls. They would get help in doing this from federal agencies. Only two states actively work to start a competing political party: China and Russia. Are we going to be the third?
Fortunately, the Senate has not passed the deliberately mis-titled SAVE Act. Maybe some GOP Senators have figured out that such an extreme law would disenfranchise some of their voters as well—such as those Hispanic and Black males who voted for Trump last year.
So contact your Republican senators. Remind them that this is a major attack on democracy, and one that could backfire on them. They might listen.
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