The GOP’s sweeping new anti-voting bill cleared the U.S. House Wednesday, setting up a high-stakes battle in the Senate.
The House voted 218-213 to pass the SAVE America Act, which experts have said could disenfranchise millions by requiring voters to show documentary proof of citizenship at registration and to provide photo ID when they cast ballots.
Republicans have argued for voter ID broadly, pointing out that there isn’t much to prevent a noncitizen from casting a ballot in a federal election — besides the fact that it’s a felony, easily caught, and would lead to deportation all for the chance to cast one out of hundreds of thousands of votes.
This mandates government registration to access an essential right of a citizen in a democracy. Ask for the same thing for gun ownership though and the right would lose their minds.
What’s interesting, is that many of us already do register with the state governments.
Its goal isn’t to regulate voting. It’s to suppress it.
Yep. Very easy to disenfranchise many people this way.
Particularly, anyone whose name or SAAB on their passport or birth certificate doesn’t match their photo id. Anyone who works during DMV hours and can’t take time off to renew an ID. Especially those who don’t drive (and thus don’t need a license).
So let’s see, that’s mainly women, genderqueer, and the working poor. Alright alright.
Who else?
I’m sure that a lot of the unhoused don’t have easy access to their birth certificate or passport.
Anybody who cut ties with their parents and can’t access this paperwork. So no strong family values.
Oh yeah. The millions of Americans who can’t even dream of leaving the country who never even got a passport in the first place.
How is this not a poll tax?
And I’m gonna guess that this is going to make mail in voting more difficult? Or perhaps we will have to verify our ID with an app, this getting all of our info while also removing anonymity from voting, at a time when one party is not just hostile, but downright violent towards members of the other.
How about this…the republicans get to have a poll tax if the Democrats get to have a literacy test. If we are gonna make voting harder, lets make it harder for both sides. Deal?
Obviously that’s quite tongue in cheek.
If I recall, any state that requires ID to vote has to give the ID free or it IS considered a poll tax. So this is going to put a lot of expense onto state governments without any federal funding to offset it.
That seems to be a major point of this government. Who is paying for all those national guard deployments, loss of renewable subsidies, SNAP, etc.
Crash the economy, which makes people afraid. Scared people are more likely to vote for a strongman.
True but you’d think they’d at least want a very different “strongman” than the one who did the crashing.
One would think, but a lot of people are miseducated as to the cause and effect of these things (to put it as politely as I can).
They’re just going to not do it. Shrug their shoulders and say “oops, not enough time to implement it but we have to have the election now” and will get a finger wagging from the Supreme Court.
or it may get a 9-0 ruling against it with no follow-up :/
Agreed. The goal is to design a system where you must prove your right to vote rather than be allowed to cast a vote with passive validation after the fact. Folks who can’t prove their right to vote are primarily low-income voters who are presumed to vote Dem.
As this is not the least restrictive means to accomplish the legitimacy of the election, it does not pass constitutional muster (good luck with the current Supreme Court though). I also wonder how this might infringe on the rights of First Nations (literally completely ignorant here) and states right to administer their own elections.
The big group this impacts is married women — in particular it has a name-matching requirement which will block a large fraction of married women from voting. They’re doing this because women have consistently been more likely to vote for Democrats than men:
This makes it very much worthwhile for Americans to ask their Senators to block this legislation by any means necessary.
What they are going to create is a world where women refuse to take their husband’s name. I’m certain the right will be up in arms over that as well. Par for the course for the poster children of unintended consequences.
If their goals were ever what they say they are, there is almost always a better policy that could drive that out come, but every time the right’s solution is “just make them.” And then big fucking Pikachu surprise when that doesn’t work out like they plan.
The goal here is to keep women from voting: the SAVE act very specifically requires that you
Because women often change name when they get married, they’ll have a mismatch, and need to spend time and money to be able to vote. If the legislation passes, it will block about 20 million Americans from voting. Because of gender disparities in voting, Republicans see this as to their advantage.
Give your Senators a call at 202-224-3121 and ask them to block this change.
…except that married women overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Source? Not trying to aggravate or anything, but I just haven’t seen any statistics that bear that out. This report from Pew Research in 2025 suggests that married women are roughly split:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-gender-sexual-orientation-marital-and-parental-status/
The image above this statement shows 45% of married women are Democrat-aligned whereas 50% of married women are Republican-aligned.
In order to legally purchase a firearm (except in a transaction between private parties) you have to fill out a federal transfer form.
If you are the type of person who cares about the government knowing you have a gun, you will certainly acquire it through a transaction between private parties.
I’m not in the USA, but in here government ID has been a requirement to vote as long as we’ve been independent. Same goes with driving license, registration of a car, guns obviously, bank accounts and a ton of other everyday stuff and it’s not really a problem. Sure, you need to take care that specially the new ID card they hand out is valid (5 years at the time if I remember correctly) since it’s often (one might argue too often) required to validate your identity.
And when done correctly it’s mostly a good thing. Last time I voted it took maybe 10 minutes and I had several days to pick one which suits me. I gave my ID card to the clerk who then checked a box that I already voted (so that they won’t give me second ballot) and then I filled the ballot and cast my vote. That’s it. And of course there’s mechanism so that you can vote even if you’re hospitalized or out of the country or something else preventing you from voting “the normal” way.
Current government at the USA seems to do everything they can to make voting more difficult, but requiring a valid ID to do so isn’t really the biggest issue you have out there.
That the thing, and ID requirement sounds reasonable but it really isn’t in the US.
First, there is no national ID. The closest we have is out Social Security Card, but that’s just a number. There is no photo or other identifying information. Every state issues drivers licenses, but those can vary widely.
For example, Arizona drivers licenses don’t expire until the person is 65 which makes them terrible for identification purposes. Imagine looking at a driver’s license photo taken at age 16 and trying to figure out if that is the same 60 year old person standing in front of you.
There are birth certificates, but those alone aren’t positive identification either. There is no federal requirement to have one, though most people do. Still, there are about 60,000 babies born outside hospitals who may or may not ever get a birth certificate. These parents are often antigovernment and think they are doing their kids a favor by hiding them from the feds.
Then there is the issue of ID requiring a permanent address. Native American reservations do not get federal mail service, so they don’t have addresses. They use post office boxes to get mail, bit those aren’t valid for ID purposes. There are also people who live out of cars, RVs, or a simply homeless who nonetheless are citizens with a right to vote.
My partner had all their IDs lost in a fire., so I’ve gone through the process of getting a new ones and it is a nightmare. First, you need a copy of your birth certificate. But they won’t give that without some sort of proof of identity. That means we had to go to my partners gynecologist (the only doctor they had been to in this state) and get a letter swearing their identity and to their bank for proof of address. Then we could order a copy (plus fees) from their home state which we had to wait for a physical copy to be mailed.
Once that arrived, we were able to fill out the forms to get a temporary social security card (have to wait for the real one to come in the mail). After that we went to the Department of Motor Vehicles (which always has a huge wait) to present all the previous forms to get a state ID (a driver’s license would have required a written test, an eye test, and a driving test as well).
This all took us a couple hours a day for more than a week of going to various offices, being told we needed other forms, getting those forms, coming back, and so forth. Imagine trying to do that with a car, or in a rural location where offices could be an hour drive apart, or trying to do that while holding down two jobs.
The general point I am making here is that if you are poor, a minority, rurally located, or simply someone who falls outside the average, getting an ID can be a significant hurdle to the basic democratic right to vote.
That’s just wild from my perspective. In here pretty much everything works with your SSN and some way you can prove it’s yours. Healthcare, pensions, schools/education in general, taxes, benefits and nearly all publicly funded things require that you can prove you are who you claim to be. Hell, I can’t even get certain type of packages out of the post office without a valid ID.
Sure, there’s some burecrautic annoyance to actually get valid ID card or passport, but compared on what you’re saying it’s walk in the park. Last time I renewed mine it was enough to submit application for it digitally and then visit a police station to actually confirm my identity for that application, but in total with traveling it took 2-3 hours.
And also I can verify my identity online pretty easily either via my bank credentials or with a phone service. For me and a lot of other people it’s really convenient, but obviously in here we also have people who can’t (or won’t learn to) use all the new tech so for them some things have gotten more difficult.
A fun side-note is that today my driving license actually doesn’t qualify as valid identification. On some cases it’s still enough and it used to be as good as actual ID card but with a ton of EU drivers licenses from other countries around it’s not ‘strong’ enough identification anymore.
The United States works a lot more like the EU than any individual country. Each state has its own politics and leadership. Some states try to make things easier, some try to make things harder, and it can all flip from one election to another. It makes it very hard to make any kind of progress. A passport would work as ID just about anywhere, but less than half of Americans have one. I don’t (and I’ve been out of the country a couple times).