Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

Mitch McConnell blocks the SAVE Act
https://crooksandliars.com/2026/02/mitc ... is-revenge

MAGAs might want to look in the mirror when they're jumping up and down about voter fraud
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/pro ... ing-wrong/

https://therationalleague.substack.com/ ... irect=true

"The Premise: A “Crisis” That Does Not Exist
The SAVE Act rests on a claim so frequently repeated that it has acquired the tone of common sense: that American elections are threatened by widespread voter impersonation and non-citizen voting, and that only stricter documentary requirements can preserve the integrity of the ballot. The problem is not merely that this claim is overstated. It is that it is factually unsound.

A comprehensive investigation conducted by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program reviewed 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases across all 50 states between 2000 and 2012. Out of those thousands of allegations, only ten involved voter impersonation, the specific type of misconduct that photo ID laws purport to prevent. In subsequent reviews of more recent cases in high-profile states, no prosecutions for in-person voter impersonation were identified (Edge & Holstege, 2016). The study concluded that the phenomenon is so rare that an individual is more likely to be, “struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” (Levitt, 2007; News21, 2016).

Independent analysis reported by The Washington Post reached a similar conclusion. Reviewing election data across decades, researchers identified approximately 31 credible cases of in-person impersonation out of more than one billion ballots cast nationwide. The incidence rate was measured in billionths, not percentages (Goel et al., 2014). In statistical terms, the threat approaches zero.

Even data compiled by partisan legal organizations fail to sustain the narrative. The Republican National Lawyers Association catalogued voter-fraud convictions between 2000 and 2010 and found that thirty states, along with the District of Columbia, had three or fewer convictions over an entire decade. (Hines, 2011) Many of those convictions involved registration irregularities, vote buying, or errors by election officials, offenses unrelated to impersonation at the polls. The data do not describe a system under siege; they describe administrative outliers within a functioning system (RNLA, 2011).

Scholarly analysis reinforces this pattern. Lorraine Minnite’s research demonstrates that the modern voter-fraud narrative was constructed through the strategic conflation of clerical mistakes, registration paperwork errors, and administrative mishaps with deliberate criminal conspiracy. Irregularities were relabeled as fraud, and isolated anomalies were elevated into evidence of systemic decay. The fraud was not discovered through evidence; it was assembled through rhetoric (Minnite, 2010).

The SAVE Act proposes to redesign the mechanics of federal voter registration in response to a category of misconduct that empirical research repeatedly shows to be vanishingly rare. Across journalistic investigations, academic databases, partisan compilations, and court-reviewed records, the conclusion converges with unusual consistency: in-person voter impersonation is not a meaningful feature of American elections.

A republic does not redesign its electoral architecture around lightning strikes.

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Courts Have Already Weighed the Evidence
The debate over strict voter-identification laws has not unfolded in a vacuum of partisan rhetoric. Federal courts have repeatedly examined the evidentiary record under oath, with adversarial briefing, expert testimony, and cross-examination. When judges have reviewed the empirical claims offered to justify these laws, the supposed crisis has not survived contact with the record.

In Frank v. Walker, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin scrutinized Wisconsin’s strict photo ID law and concluded that a meaningful number of eligible voters lacked the required identification and could not obtain it with reasonable effort. The court recognized that underlying documents necessary to secure ID, such as birth certificates, often required fees, travel, and bureaucratic navigation that some voters could not accomplish. The court required an affidavit-based safety net for voters unable to obtain ID, acknowledging that the burden imposed by the law was real and not theoretical (Frank v. Walker, 2016).

Similarly, in Veasey v. Abbott, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, evaluated Texas’s Senate Bill 14 and determined that the law had a discriminatory effect under the Voting Rights Act. The court examined extensive legislative and statistical evidence demonstrating that African American and Latino voters were disproportionately less likely to possess the specific forms of identification required. Crucially, the court also observed that the record contained no meaningful evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud sufficient to justify the magnitude of the burden imposed. The justification presented by the state did not align with documented reality (Veasey v. Abbott, 2016).

The Fourth Circuit reached an even more pointed conclusion when reviewing North Carolina’s omnibus voting law. After evaluating legislative history and data on racial disparities in ID possession and voting methods, the court concluded that the law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” That language was not rhetorical excess; it was a judicial finding based on the structure and impact of the statute and the absence of evidence demonstrating a corresponding fraud problem (North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, 2016).

Across jurisdictions, courts have repeatedly described in-person voter impersonation, the central rationale for strict photo ID laws, as virtually nonexistent. Judges have not dismissed the concern as trivial out of political sympathy. They have assessed the record and found that the empirical foundation is thin to the point of evaporation. The asserted threat has not been demonstrated in the courtroom, where evidence must withstand scrutiny rather than repetition.

When courts examine the record, the “fraud crisis” dissolves.

What These Laws Actually Do
If the first move in this debate is to dismantle the myth of a fraud crisis, the second must be to examine what strict identification and proof-of-citizenship regimes actually accomplish in practice.

The record is not speculative. It is empirical.

Start with Georgia. In a large-scale audit of approximately 2.1 million ballots, Hood and Gillespie examined claims of voter irregularities and found virtually no evidence of systematic fraud capable of altering outcomes. The supposed epidemic failed to materialize under scrutiny. The mechanisms designed to catch in-person impersonation uncovered almost nothing of substance. The dragnet was cast; the ocean was empty.

Meanwhile, claims about widespread non-citizen voting, frequently cited to justify proof-of-citizenship requirements, have repeatedly collapsed under validation. Ansolabehere and colleagues, analyzing Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data that had been used to suggest significant non-citizen participation, demonstrated that the apparent “non-citizen voting” findings were artifacts of survey misclassification. When responses were verified and revalidated, the alleged rates of non-citizen voting shrank to statistical insignificance. The headline claim dissolved once the data were cleaned.

Courts reviewing strict identification laws have not merely found fraud rare; they have documented measurable burdens.

In Veasey v. Abbott, the Fifth Circuit concluded that Texas’s SB 14 disproportionately burdened minority voters, who were statistically less likely to possess the narrow forms of acceptable identification. The court detailed the layered barriers: travel distances to issuing offices, fees for underlying documents, bureaucratic correction procedures, and limited office hours. The issue was not merely the plastic card. It was the chain of prerequisites, birth certificates, name consistency, transportation, time off work, that determined who could realistically comply.

Similarly, in Frank v. Walker, the district court recognized that some eligible voters lacked qualifying ID and faced substantial obstacles in obtaining it. For elderly voters born before standardized birth record systems, documentation could be incomplete or inconsistent. For low-income voters, the cost and time required to navigate administrative hurdles were nontrivial. The court required an affidavit option precisely because the evidence showed that some citizens could not meet the state’s demands with reasonable effort.

When proof-of-citizenship requirements are layered on top of photo ID rules, as contemplated by measures like the SAVE Act, the burdens compound rather than merely add.

Naturalized citizens are less likely to carry original naturalization certificates in daily life; replacing such documents is costly and slow. Married women whose legal names differ from birth certificates can face documentation mismatches requiring additional certified records. Elderly citizens born in rural areas before uniform hospital documentation may lack easily retrievable birth records. Rural and low-income citizens often face limited access to Department of Motor Vehicles offices, constrained hours, and transportation barriers.

These are not abstractions. They are categories documented in litigation records, statistical analyses, and administrative findings.

Strict ID and citizenship-proof laws do not intercept a flood of impersonators. They operate as eligibility filters that sort citizens by documentation status, bureaucratic fluency, and logistical capacity. The measurable effect is not fraud prevention; it is differential burden.

The data are clear on the first point: the fraud targeted by these laws is vanishingly rare. The record is equally clear on the second: the burdens are not vanishingly rare at all.

The SAVE Act Specifically
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act amends the National Voter Registration Act to require documentary proof of United States citizenship before an individual may be registered to vote in federal elections. An attestation under penalty of perjury is no longer sufficient. A signed oath, the backbone of the existing federal registration system for three decades, becomes subordinate to paperwork.

The bill mandates presentation of a REAL ID reflecting citizenship, a passport, specified military documentation, or a government-issued photo ID paired with a certified birth certificate or equivalent record. It conditions registration on physical presentation of these documents and authorizes ongoing federal and state data matching programs to identify and remove suspected non-citizens. It creates civil liability and criminal exposure for election officials who register applicants lacking documentary proof. It explicitly overrides the long-standing structure of the National Voter Registration Act, which was designed to streamline registration while preserving safeguards against fraud.

The problem it claims to solve does not exist at scale. There is no verified body of evidence showing widespread non-citizen voting in federal elections. Large-scale investigations have repeatedly found the incidence of in-person impersonation fraud to be statistically negligible (News21, 2016; Goel et al., Washington Post database). Survey-based claims of non-citizen voting have collapsed under validation analysis, where apparent instances were explained by measurement error rather than actual ballots cast (Ansolabehere et al., 2014). Courts reviewing strict identification regimes have noted the absence of record evidence demonstrating a meaningful problem of impersonation fraud (Frank v. Walker, 2016; Veasey v. Abbott, 2016).

What does exist in the record is extensive documentation that underlying citizenship documents are not uniformly accessible. Courts have found that significant numbers of eligible voters lack the required forms of photo identification and, more importantly, the underlying documents necessary to obtain them. The Fifth Circuit documented racial disparities in access to qualifying identification and the burdens associated with securing supporting records (Veasey v. Abbott, 2016). The Eastern District of Wisconsin recognized that some eligible voters could not obtain ID with reasonable effort and required an affidavit alternative to mitigate exclusion (Frank v. Walker, 2016). These findings were not speculative; they were based on evidentiary records.

The SAVE Act nationalizes the most burdensome aspects of those state systems. It requires documentary proof of citizenship at the point of registration for all federal elections, regardless of existing state verification practices. It expands reliance on administrative databases, including immigration verification systems designed for benefit eligibility, not electoral registration. It imposes documentation demands that naturalized citizens may not have immediately available, that elderly citizens born before standardized recordkeeping may struggle to obtain, and that married women whose names differ from birth certificates must reconcile.

There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. There is substantial evidence that documentary barriers prevent eligible citizens from registering and voting. The record is not ambiguous. The asymmetry is the point.

The Conclusion: This Debate Is Manufactured
By the time one reaches the end of the record, the word “crisis” has nowhere left to stand. The empirical literature does not support it. Prosecutorial data does not support it. Court findings do not support it. The claim persists only because repetition has replaced verification.

Systematic investigations of alleged voter fraud repeatedly collapse under scrutiny. The News21 review of fraud cases across multiple states found that voter impersonation, the specific offense strict identification and documentary citizenship requirements are designed to prevent, was vanishingly rare, amounting to a tiny fraction of alleged cases (News21, 2012; NBC News, 2016). The Washington Post’s database, compiled with statistical oversight, identified only a few dozen credible impersonation cases out of more than a billion ballots cast nationwide over many years (Goel et al., Washington Post database). Even data produced by Republican-affiliated legal organizations show extraordinarily low conviction totals over a decade, often involving conduct unrelated to in-person impersonation (Hines, 2011).

More rigorous academic scrutiny makes the point clearer. Careful reanalysis of survey claims about non-citizen voting demonstrated that apparent rates of participation were artifacts of measurement error in extremely low-base populations (Ansolabehere, Luks & Schaffner, 2015). The statistical warning is straightforward: when the underlying phenomenon is exceedingly rare, small classification errors generate illusory patterns. Likewise, investigations of alleged irregularities often reveal administrative mistakes, eligibility confusion, or data-matching flaws rather than coordinated schemes (Minnite, 2010). What is presented politically as evidence of organized fraud frequently dissolves into bureaucratic noise.

Courts, when required to evaluate actual evidence rather than campaign rhetoric, have repeatedly observed the same asymmetry: the asserted fraud problem is negligible, while the burdens imposed by strict documentation requirements are concrete and measurable (Frank v. Walker, 2016; Veasey v. Abbott, 2016). The constitutional record reflects no epidemic requiring architectural redesign of federal registration systems.

The structure of the argument therefore reverses itself. A problem described as urgent turns out to be statistically microscopic. The proposed remedy is sweeping and federally mandatory. The predictable burdens fall on identifiable groups whose documentation is more difficult to assemble or reconcile. When legislation expands while the underlying harm shrinks toward zero, the stated justification loses credibility. Public policy aimed at preserving electoral integrity should correspond to demonstrated risk. Here, the scale does not match.

The conclusion is not ideological; it is evidentiary. There is no documented epidemic of voter impersonation. There is no demonstrated wave of non-citizen voting distorting federal elections. There is, however, a sustained political narrative that survives the absence of proof.

A political movement that insists on solving a problem the data cannot substantiate is not engaged in neutral reform. It is redefining the electorate through procedural filtration. When lightning-strike probabilities are invoked to justify structural barriers, the issue is no longer fraud prevention but power allocation.

There is no good-faith debate left to have about voter impersonation fraud. The evidentiary record has already answered it, repeatedly and with statistical clarity.

References
Ansolabehere, S., Luks, S., & Schaffner, B. F. (2015). The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys. Electoral Studies, 40, 409–410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2015.07.002

Frank v. Walker, 196 F. Supp. 3d 893 (E.D. Wis. 2016).

GOEL S, MEREDITH M, MORSE M, ROTHSCHILD D, SHIRANI-MEHR H. One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections. American Political Science Review. 2020;114(2):456-469. doi:10.1017/S000305541900087X

Hood, M.V., III and Gillespie, W. (2012), They Just Do Not Vote Like They Used To: A Methodology to Empirically Assess Election Fraud*. Social Science Quarterly, 93: 76-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00837.x

Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222 (1985).

Minnite, L. C. (2010). The Politics of Voter Fraud. Cornell University Press.

NAACP State Conference of North Carolina v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204 (4th Cir. 2016).

News21. (2016, August 26). Study finds no evidence of widespread voter fraud. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/st ... ud-n637776

Hines, D. (2011, December 12). New Republican data shows no need for voter ID laws. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voter-fr ... _b_1139085

Veasey v. Abbott, 830 F.3d 216 (5th Cir. 2016) (en banc).

Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977).

.
Hypocritical ReBoplicans have been screaming and jumping up and down and peeing themselves - FOR YEARS - about:

- ‘too much Federal control’,
- ‘too many Federal rules’,
- ‘get the Feds off my back’,
- ‘We are a Republic where authority is at the State level’,
- etc etc

NOW….want to exert Federal Control over Elections….CLEARLY a violation of the Constitution…..but that’s OK, now?!?!

It will be interesting to see what other pretzel logic occurs…..
.

Only 39 cases of voter fraud were ID'd in a recent election, a mere 0.000039% of over 100 million ballots castOnly 39 cases of voter fraud were ID'd in a recent election, a mere 0.000039% of over 100 million ballots cast

Those stats have ya worried?

Hypocritical Democrats
Well apparently the way of posting screen shots has changed

The Reps just realized that the states which hold the fewest passports per capita are Red which makes the voter ID requirements of the SAVE Act problematic for their voters.

Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama have the lowest rates of passport ownership in the United States, with less than 26% of residents in these states holding a passport. Other states with low ownership include Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, and South Dakota. These states are primarily located in the South and Midwest.
Top 10 States with Lowest Passport Ownership Rates:
Mississippi: 20.6%
West Virginia: 20.8%
Alabama: 25.3%
Arkansas: 26.2%
Kentucky: 27.4%
Louisiana: 29.1%
Tennessee: 31.4%
Oklahoma: 31.8%
Indiana: 33.5%
South Dakota: 35.2%
These rates are significantly lower than the national average, with coastal states like New Jersey (68.36%) and California often having the highest ownership rates.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/fi ... -save-act/

What we have is a bunch of people who try to say the maximally shocking things to get more clicks.

Even more scary is that if you asked them if they actually believed what they said, or what they actually believe, they'd either think that was a stupid question or just wouldn't understand what you are asking.

He must think alot of MAGA women will go along with that crazy idea. Lot of the MAGA influencers have said it is all the liberal white women's fault that our society is falling apart. Well, men can't have invitro fertilization babies. So who is it that carries babies and stupid monsters like him?
That's why people like Fuentes are afraid of abortion.

It still needs sixty votes to even get a vote in the Senate. And when their guy Nick Fuentes is saying that all women should be put in concentration camps it makes it super obvious what their real intentions are here.

So what happened to the video of the woman saying, hey no worries? Just have an official write out that a person is a citizen, sign it, good to go.

What just happened and where we are
https://plus.briantylercohen.com/p/hous ... irect=true

I think that problem with local officials putting their thumbs on the scale of voter suppression is an ongoing problem. Especially since the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.

Good video Rideback regarding SAVE act. It probably will not get passed, we hope. Most people don't know about the giving of the attestation to the voring official. Hmm, may research that and it could be worth a letter to the editor.
But here is a question I too had, posted by some of the commenters.

Thanks for the explanation. I personally haven't been freaking out too much, if only because it seems as if it would have to make its way through the courts before November to affect this election, even if it did pass. But, "to their satisfaction"? But what if they're determined not to be satisfied because they have decided that you are the "wrong" type of person to be voting? Maybe it has been that way before, but doesn't that kind of depend on the good faith of the state or local official, which is fine for me in NYS, but what if I'm someone with a Spanish last name or an accent in FL or TX?

About the Trump posted Obama video. Fact checking
https://www.patreon.com/posts/flash-fac ... dium=email

Speaking of fraud...

I was watching the crazy-arse video Trump reposted last night, the one that had two seconds of the Obamas faces superimposed on the bodies of dancing apes from the Lion King.

There was an interesting glimpse of something messed up in that video:
That IP address is wrong. An IP address where the first octet is "10" indicates a network address that isn't routable and connected to the greater internet. Yes, you can use address translation to connect with outbound services, but nobody from the outside world (in New Zealand, Venezuela, or Italy) would have a way to directly connect to that voting machine with that network address.

So I'm wondering if this stuff is all fake. It certainly is not likely to be the actual logs from that voting machine.

Pal, watch the video
https://annepmitchell.substack.com/p/ab ... dium=email

A reasonable and thoughtful person might well oppose the SAVE act just because it is an enormously costly effort that recklessly interferes with constitutional rights and is being aimed at a tiny problem. As such it is an injudicious use of scarce government resources.

The fact of the matter that non-citizen voting in federal election is vanishingly rare:

https://www.mormonwomenforethicalgovern ... f8QAvD_BwE

After extensive investigations, results indicate that about 0.0001% of votes in the 2016 federal election were cast by noncitizens. After years of inquiries, officials say that though it may occur, noncitizen voting is quite rare.


States regularly conduct audits of their databases to remove voters who have died, committed a felony, moved, or are noncitizens. However, many people are automatically registered to vote when they apply for a driver’s license, and in some cases the system mistakenly registers noncitizens. Most of the noncitizens found on voter rolls have never cast a ballot.

And there are multiple checks in place to make sure that illegal voting by noncitizens remains rare:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ ... ng-illegal

So what exactly is the problem that is being solved here? At the estimated rates about one out of one million votes is being cast unlawfully by non-citizens. Hard to see how that impacts any election outcomes.

I'll go even further. The error rate in our election system implies that something between 1 out of 10000 and 1 out of 100000 votes are miscounted. So that error rate all by itself is a problem that is between ten and one hundred times larger than voting by non-citizens. So an intellectually honest person acting in good faith who was really concerned about election integrity would be interested in how we fix that problem first.

Ken, know it all, how do you know they won't prevent women from voting. Read the details of the SAVE act.
Women cannot take it for granted that they will be able to vote. Birth certificates that do not match their other ID's. Not everyone can afford a Passport and shouldn't have to. And now it's liberal white women that are being blamed for the "ill's" of our society.
Right, like I'm going to cheat on my mail in ballot. At least here in Wa. mail in should be good.
As usual you lash out, call people names.

You guys are such morons! No, PAL nobody is going to prevent married women from voting legally! EVERYTHING requires ID to do these days, voting is no exception......unless that's your only chance to cheat?! Hmmmm

Yes, their intentions are clear.

From a practical standpoint, it seems like a heavy lift to get this passed in the House with a 2-vote majority. And an even heavier lift to get past a filibuster in the Senate. The level of idiocy in both the House and Senate bills (which contradict each other) doesn't help them get the numbers.

There is also a big constitutional question here, with narrow exceptions only states get to decide who is eligible to vote. It is hard to see how disenfranchising tens of millions of people who clearly have the right to vote under the constitution would pass any kind of constitutional test.

This is also a good use case for "soft seccession".

Listen up women. Maybe not here with mail in voting but all over the country, if passed means women voting is in jeopardy.

Carlyn Beccia
You have to admire Republicans’ creative labeling. The latest is a doozy. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) is here to “save” democracy. And by “save,” they mean saving it for husbands and not their wives, exactly as Project 2025 intended.
The SAVE Act is a proposed law that changes the required proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections. Here’s the problem: The Act demands documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) before you can register to vote. And what counts as proof? A passport (which many Americans don’t have), a military ID with service records (because obviously, everyone has that lying around), or a birth certificate (but only if it matches your current legal name).
And that’s where married women get thrown under the election bus.
If you changed your last name when you married, your birth certificate still has your maiden name. This means — according to this law — you won’t exist as a voter unless you can prove that the woman born as Jane Maidenname and the woman trying to register as Jane Marriedname are the same person. A marriage certificate? Not good enough because it’s not on the list of acceptable documents.
And don’t even think about using your driver’s license or REAL ID. Unless it explicitly lists U.S. citizenship (most don’t), that won’t work either. Basically, if you don’t have the correct paperwork, tough luck, girl. Go back to nineteenth-century America and do not pass Go.
If this Act becomes law, the National Organization for Women estimates that 34% of female voters could be turned away at the polls for incorrect paperwork. And most of them won’t know it until it’s too late.
Of course, Republicans are pitching it as a way to prevent noncitizens from voting. Back in 2021, Trump claimed that 36,000 ballots “were illegally cast by noncitizens” in Arizona. Musk stoked these fears again during the 2024 election by accusing Democrats of “The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible.” Pleeeeeease.
Noncitizens voting in a federal election is a federal offense under 18 USC 611: Voting by aliens. That is not to say it never happens. A 2016 analysis by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting.
30 cases of immigrants voting out of 23.5 million votes cast in the 42 jurisdictions reviewed. Terrifying! Call the Gestapo.
Better yet, let’s think about this logically. If you were an illegal immigrant in America, would you risk getting deported, or worse, shipped off to Gitmo for a freakin’ “I voted” sticker? Hey, MAGA, congratulations. You have people who contribute to our economy living in fear. You won. Now, get out of your mom’s basement and get a job in a meatpacking plant because we are about to experience a labor shortage that will make your pork chops cost as much as the black-market kidney. Oh, and eggs have doubled in price.
It’s clear what Republicans are doing. They know that most women don’t lean toward MAGA idiocy, so they are trying to remove us from the voting pool.
Let them try.

When I first wrote about the SAVE Act, it was still “just a proposal.” Now, it has passed the House of Representatives and is sitting in the Senate. Which means this is no longer a scary feminist bedtime story. This is an active voter-suppression bill in motion.
Yes, it still needs 60 votes in the Senate. Yes, it can still be stopped. But it has already cleared a major legislative hurdle, which is exactly why you are suddenly seeing headlines, threads, and influencers treating it as breaking news instead of a slow-moving disaster some of us have been screaming about for over a year.
And if it does get passed? Well, then, you have permission to freak your freak out. Like the kind of freak out that brings hysteria back as an untreatable female condition. But first, a way to circumvent this voter suppression.
1. Make sure your passport is up to date. Don’t feel bad if you never got a passport. 51% of Americans don’t have a passport. Just get it done.
2. Trans people must fill out passport forms correctly. And by “correctly,” I mean the f*cked up Nazi way, which denies your existence. You must check the gender you were assigned at birth. I know. I know. Never obey. But you can’t vote Republicans out of office if you can’t vote.
3. If you are about to get married, do not change your name. Your birth certificate will still work as a valid form of ID if your legal name matches your birth name.
4. If you are about to get divorced, change your name back to your maiden name (or the name that appears on your birth certificate). Changing your name at marriage and divorce is easy. Outside of these two events, it is a legal quagmire of court dates and paperwork. Trust me. I know. I took my ex-husband’s name after I got married. I had to pay fees, fill out a mountain load of paperwork, and appear in court…twice.
The Brennan Center for Justice has called the SAVE Act “the worst voting laws in congressional history.” This act would not only gut mail-in voting but also make voting for women harder than getting an airline refund.
This bill isn’t about election security. It’s about shrinking the electorate.