This is a post that explains why Publius 21C opposes the SAVE Act and what Republicans could do, if they are serious, to overcome our objections. First, we’ll outline the reasons for our distrust of this legislation.
In the late 1870s, faced with newly liberated slaves voting, Southern conservative states began adopting poll taxes and literacy tests as way to prevent black Americans and poor whites from voting. By 1902, all 11 former Confederate states had instituted some form of this voter suppression. It was so successful that black voter registration dropped from 90% to 8%. This continued all the way to the adoption of the 24th amendment in 1964 along with the Voting Rights act. In 1966, the Supreme Court ruled that they were unconstitutional in state and local elections as well.
Many people will say that this was so long ago – it has no bearing on the desire for secure elections today. Well, consider more recent public statements by Republican officials relevant to our concerns: In 2014, Fran Millar (Georgia State rep) openly complained about new polling places: “[T]his location is dominated by African-American shoppers and it is near several large African-American mega churches such as New Birth Missionary Baptist..” Or 2012, in response to longer polling hours the Ohio GOP chair Doug Preis said, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” In 2013 North Carolina Precinct Chair, Don Yelton, in an interview admitted that voter fraud is not the real purpose for voter id laws “if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” and then adds, “The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.”
In public and private statements, the Republican party has admitted the true purpose behind these laws is to make it harder for minorities to vote. The SAVE Act also makes it harder for women to vote, and while it’s hard to determine the true effect of the internet punditry, there has been a lot of denigration of women voting rights by right wing “influencers”.
The point is there is a long history up to the present of an explicit attempt to make it harder for minorities, poor people and women to vote. The SAVE Act is in the same vein as these other attempts to restrict voting by placing additional requirements and cost on American citizens before they can vote. And this is all for a non-existent problem since extensive scrutiny of alleged voter fraud in federal elections have found only a couple dozen documented cases of non-citizens voting. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/four-things-to-know-about-noncitizen-voting/
The above article concludes: “A BPC analysis of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Cases database found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023.2 A study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election concluded that there were approximately 30 instances of noncitizens casting votes. Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”
Note: The Heritage Foundation is very conservative.
We do know that the additional requirements of cost and time that the SAVE Act will place on poor people will significantly reduce the number who will qualify and vote. We are assuming causing fewer American citizens to vote is not the objective of the Red Team, right? So the SAVE Act will create a real problem in trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
Now, a compromise could be that the government cover the cost for poor citizens to obtain the voter id’s and to make it possible to obtain the voter id’s during nonstandard business hours. Could we agree that would be a reasonable compromise?
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