Under intense pressure from a desperate and vindictive boss, U.S. Senate Republicans, including Ohio U.S. Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, are frantically spinning a radical voter suppression bill as a “simple voter ID” measure.
What’s not to like? Husted and Moreno know the misnamed “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act” does much more than require a photo ID to vote, yet they never acknowledge the devil in the details.
The so-called SAVE Act would block millions of American citizens from voting who can’t produce birth certificates or passports to register to vote or update their registrations.
Some 21 million citizens lack ready access to those documents.
That doesn’t include 69 million married women nationwide who have changed their names (more than 3 million in Ohio) who would have to jump through extra hoops just to prove their citizenship.
Less than half of all Americans have passports. If the SAVE Act were enacted, with Husted and Moreno’s help — your driver’s license, REAL ID, or military ID would no longer be good enough to exercise your most fundamental right to vote.
Effective immediately you would have to show documentary proof of your citizenship for what Donald Trump called “the greatest privilege of them all, voting in America.”
Sorry, voting is a right not a “privilege” bestowed by a convicted felon who tried to subvert it when an election didn’t go his way.
Trump is planning a sequel in 2026.
The SAVE Act is his preemptive manipulation of another election not expected to go his way.
The lower Trump’s approval ratings fall the more he fixates on controlling who gets to vote with gratuitous obstacles championed by regime bootlickers as “commonsense” election reform.
“It’s going to clean up our elections and give, most importantly, people faith and confidence in our elections,” claimed Moreno, reinforcing Trump’s baseless 2020 lies about rigged elections and rampant voter fraud that sow unfounded doubts about gold standard American elections.
The SAVE Act that Moreno is cheerleading would make it harder for some Ohioans to cast a ballot if they have to dig up a birth certificate first, (if one even exists) or match a marriage certificate with a maiden name birth certificate, or shell out $165 for a passport that may or may not arrive before the midterms.
Citizens would also have to show their papers in person.
Forget about registering to vote by mail, online, or through voter registration drives — methods used by 94% of Americans.
If the SAVE Act became law now, voter registration systems across the country could be upended with chaos and confusion, a recipe for depressed voter turnout.
When it is hard to vote — with onerous paperwork that costs time and money to get or in-person registration requirements that stymie rural Ohioans and others with mobility and transportation challenges, many eligible voters don’t.
The “papers-please” barriers in the SAVE Act, that Moreno and Husted conveniently skip over in their “just-a-voter-ID” script, could sideline millions of citizens in the upcoming election — especially those in rural areas, women, minorities, students, seniors, the disabled, and low-income working Ohioans unable to gather or afford documents never before required to vote.
Republicans claim the bill is needed to keep noncitizens from voting (which is already illegal) even though study after study has shown they do not vote.
It is a virtually nonexistent problem. Even the right-wing Heritage Foundation concurs.
Affirmations of citizenship on voter registrations, signed under penalty of perjury, worked for decades without issue until one was invented as a pretext to erect voting hurdles on Americans Trump fears at the polls.
Silencing those voters steals their power to decide the outcome of elections.
The SAVE Act gives Trump control over who gets to vote and how to engineer favorable election outcomes with the “right voters.”
Passage of the bill “will guarantee the midterms,” he told GOP lawmakers.
“We have to win this one,” (the SAVE Act) Trump said, exhorting Republicans to essentially suppress the vote to win in November and save him from a third impeachment.
“We’ll never lose a race for 50 years,” he promised, but “if we don’t win, they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”
Apparently lost on Trump is how many Republican voters in rural areas or with low incomes will also be impacted.
Husted championed the SAVE Act even though it would diminish the power of millions of Ohioans to have a voice in elections, on specious grounds of made-up problems.
As a former chief elections officer in the state, the senator could have dispelled voter fraud and noncitizen voting falsehoods with facts learned on the job.
But Husted preferred Trump’s endorsement.
“As I’ve been saying for a decade and a half it is possible to make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat and we should make that a standard with a national ID law that is easy to implement and proven effective.”
Kansas might beg to differ.
Its 2013 version of the SAVE Act (with birth certificates or passports) prevented thousands of eligible applicants from registering to vote before the catastrophic law was struck down.
If denying citizens their right to vote isn’t bad enough, the SAVE Act would also make every state submit full voter rolls to Trump’s shadowy Department of Homeland Security with no restrictions on what DHS can do with the sensitive data it collects.
Yet Moreno hails the bill as a “long overdue” voting safeguard in his parody of protecting the cornerstone of our democracy: Screw voters; he got a thumbs up from the boss.
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.