Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.
The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.
These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.
Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.
Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.
Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.
Note that it stipulates passport or birth certificate and perhaps marriage certificate, and gives them leeway to waive these requirements. It’s rationalized by “voter identity”, but a birth certificate doesn’t prove your identity, even if you can validate it (mine is a rotting old piece of paper with an embossed stamp, seems easy enough to fake), it would only mean a person was born with the name that you claim to have.
For many people, the specifically requested documents are lost or they never had them.
Now if this was a “need to establish a fair voter id system and issue cards to all voters with a reasonable timeline to actually pull this off”, then the argument could be made. But it is a last minute “better have you birth certificate right now, no time to get replacements from the government, don’t vote instead, unless we decide you are ok, then you can vote anyway”.
Particularly the leeway to not require the document is similar to another voter suppression method of the past. “Pass a literacy test to vote”, which might sound like an …ok… idea, except the tests were designed to be impossible to pass, with bad wording, multiple plausibly correct options, etc. But at least it was unfair to everyone, right? Oh, if your grandfather could vote, you are exempted. So a lot of black people were conveniently blocked from exemption on a test that claimed to support educated voting but was just designed to ti fail everyone that would be required to take it.