I went to a meeting of the League of Women Voters earlier this week.
I came away thinking that if things go the way I expect they’re going, they might need to change their name to the “League of Women,” because the voting part is about to get really dicey.
Pending before Congress is a nasty little bill called the “SAVE” Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility.
It’s another Republican effort to require “proof of citizenship” documents to vote, on the false premise that it prevents undocumented immigrants from voting. It passed the House last year — and has been reintroduced this year — despite the fact that every legitimate study ever done, including by the right-wing Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, has shown that voting by unauthorized immigrants is negligible.
The reason is obvious.
If you’re here without legal residency, the last thing you want to do is interact with state and federal authorities. There are mountains of evidence so tall that even most Republicans who push the lie of illegal immigrant voting don’t actually believe it anymore — if they ever did in the first place.
Make no mistake: The SAVE Act’s real target is the ongoing participation in politics of America’s women, because polls show they’re more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than men are.
Anything else is a cynical lie, brought to you by Q-Anon shamans and the power-over-principle wing of the Republican Party.
Kansas disaster
In Kansas, we’ve been down this road already and it was an abject disaster, which disenfranchised tens of thousands of legitimate American citizens without ever finding a single vote cast by an undocumented immigrant.
The SAVE act is nothing but a warmed-over federal version of the proof-of-citizenship provisions of the Kansas SAFE Act of 2011 — a law the Legislature passed at the urging of Kansas’ director of voter suppression, then-Secretary of State and now Attorney General Kris Kobach.
The SAFE Act required that voters provide documental proof of their citizenship to register to vote.
I can already hear the specious and disingenuous argument that’s always raised when this topic comes up: “You need ID to cash a check, so why don’t you to vote?”
So let’s deal with that right off. We are not talking about having to show your driver’s license or other commonly available photo ID at the polls.
The SAFE Act and the SAVE Act “proof of citizenship” requirement is much more stringent and requires specific documents that practically nobody carries on their person and that many people don’t have easy access to — a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate.
Here’s how it targets women specifically: Eight out of 10 women who marry change their names. So for an estimated 69 million women, there’s a mismatch between the name on their birth certificate and their current ID.
Unlike men, they need to bring birth certificates, marriage certificates and sometimes divorce decrees to show how they got from the last name they were born with to the one they have now.
