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.
For me as a European it’s weird why there is such push back against voter ID. could someone explain what the deal is? in my country you can’t vote without an ID with a photo and I think it’s normal that you need to prove who you are when you vote.
This is one of those things where you need to understand the intricacies of how our elections work. You don’t and no one here will have the time or patience to explain it to people that don’t need to know. Voter ID is against our constitution.
It would be nice if foreigners understood they can’t possibly learn why this is in a social media comment and to not make ignorant assumptions just because “well it works in my tiny little country”.
We have that as well but it’s managed by each state instead of nationally. Usually with a state drivers license or state level ID card.
People are not against voter ID, we are against bad voter ID that disenfranchises people before an election.
We have our IDs, but they want more than that, they want birth certificates becuase apparently, they all want passports, birth certificates which is really hard to get because not everyone still has their natural name. Social Security Cards are hard because the Social Security Administration is a pain in the ass to work with and sometimes they don’t have your information either.
To get a new SSN card, you’re going to need your parent’s SSN as well. Which is incredibly difficult because not every parent knows their SSN by heart or better yet, some people don’t even know where their parents are, some people don’t even have relationships with them anymore.
It’s literally such a hassle, the regular common Joe/Jane is not gonna do that, they’re going to ignore it becasue they don’t want to deal with the hassle because the regular common person in America is working hard and working a hard life at that.
The problem is that in this country there is no automatically issued national id. To get one costs money and takes time, something the demographic they are trying to prevent voting does not have in abundance.
Also, elections are run by the states in this country, and most do already require a proof. My state requires a utility bill, or ID, or something that proves you live at the address, which are tied to voter roles. So the ID thing is a red herring mostly, and non-citizen voters are usually limited to tiny fractions of percentages if any. It is not an actual problem, just a useful one.
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.
Not US but the answer is simple.
IDs are a taboo in the US (otherwise the government would interfere with your privacy or something).
So they have