THE SAVE AMERICA ACT SAVES NOTHING

      “A Note on Election Fraud,” which I appended to a recent blog, prompted a response from Representative Rebecca Dow (R, District 38).  My note addresses the issue of voter fraud and ends with a challenge to those who insist that millions of people have voted fraudulently in recent presidential elections.  Perceiving an attack on her position, Dow responded with the politician’s defensive non-sequitur: “So you oppose voter I’d [sic].”

I replied that “I am not opposed to it [voter ID]; I had to ID myself the first time I registered to vote, about 60 years ago, and have had to ID myself every time I have relocated.  But the demands were relatively simple; I do not recall having to show either a birth certificate or a passport.  In fact, I cannot remember what I had to do to ID myself.  But the world was not then run by paranoids or poseurs claiming most people or large numbers of minority groups were trying to pass themselves off as citizens entitled to vote.”

 

In the course of our exchange, Dow maintained a position consistent with either the SAVE Act or the SAVE America Act.

 

I believe in one vote per one legal citizen.

As I understand the proposed federal bill, the bill would require documenting proof Us citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Unless it’s been amended. Include includes things like US passport, birth certificate, or other official citizenship documentation [sic, seriatim]

I have zero issues with that [sic]

 

Apparently, Dow thinks that I or others believe that non-citizens or some citizens should have one or more votes.  I do not, I know no one who does, but I urge her to contact VP Vance, who would give people with children more than one vote.  She knows the documentation required for registering but not the documentation required for voting.  She knows or cares nothing about the consequences of these requirements.  She ignored my claim that these requirements might disenfranchise millions of potential voters, including millions of women whose names on their birth certificates and their passports or drivers licenses do not match because they took their husband's name when they married.  And she did not answer my questions about whether she approved of the consequences.  So there the exchange ended.

 

•      •      •

 

Now that the Senate is debating the SAVE America Act, people should understand its provisions.  Central is the requirement of would-be voters to provide documents proving U.S. citizenship—e.g., passport, birth certificate, or government-issued photo identification—when registering to vote and a photo identification when voting.  (There are other requirements, some relevant to elections, some not, like those dealing with transgender issues.  What is with Republicans’ obsession with sex and gender?)

 

The SAVE America Act means to be a legislative solution to the alleged problem of large-scale voter fraud, that is, millions of non-citizens voting in recent presidential elections.  The allegation defies all evidence and losses of 61 of 62 cases challenging the votes in the 2020 presidential election.  If there were millions of fraudulent votes cast, there would be abundant evidence of them.  Yet incidents of election fraud as measured by convictions are few.

 

My source of information is The Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization which developed Project 2025.  Its Election Fraud Map identifies five kinds of cases, each kind reflecting the disposition cases brought to court; it also identifies eleven kinds of election fraud, including false registration or impersonation fraud at the polls, the kinds for which personal identification is relevant.  For a sense of proportion, I used Wikipedia figures for the turnout in the eleven presidential election years from 1984 through 2024.  I tabulated the cases of fraud convictions in federal election years from 1982 through 2024.

 

			All Elections: 1982-2024
		Convictions for Federal Election-Year Fraud
Presidential Election Turnout			All Fraud	False Regis	Voter Impers	Alien Voter
		1982	67	67	0	0
1984	92,654,861	1984	no data
		1986	41	0	0	0
1988	91,586,725	1988	1	0	0	0
		1990	no data
1992	104,600,366	1992	1	0	0	0
		1994	4	0	0	0
1996	96,389,818	1996	2	0	0	0
		1998	10	0	0	0
2000	105,405,100	2000	18	3	0	0
		2002	11	2	0	0
2004	122,349,480	2004	31	2	1	0
		2006	42	12	0	0
2008	131,406,895	2008	43	21	0	0
		2010	119	23	0	0
2012	129,139,997	2012	83	9	0	0
		2014	72	17	0	0
2016	136,669,237	2016	71	10	3	no data
		2018	87	17	0	0
2020	158,427,986	2020	31	7	2	no data
		2022	94	9	9	no data
2024	155,240,955	2024	43	23	1	1
total	1,323,871,420	total	871	222	16	1

 

The number of all convictions for fraud in the nation are a miniscule fraction of the total number of votes cast.  There is no reason to think that millions of undetected incidents of false registration or voter impersonation at the polls have occurred in red and blue states.  Again, the cases brought to challenge 2020 election results produced no evidence of voter fraud.  From 1982 through 2024, New Mexico had a total of 8 cases of fraud, of which 3 were of false registration and 1 was of impersonation fraud at the polls.  Such is the magnitude of the problem.

 

Only in the minds of the intellectually diseased (ID) or ideologically driven (ID) would such numbers suggest a problem at all, much less a demented effort to eliminate it entirely by draconian methods.  No reasonable solution of a “problem” of only about 240 convictions out of about 2 billion votes cast in federal elections for false registration and voter impersonation would propose the possible disenfranchisement of many millions—the common estimate is 21 million—of potential voters.  Yet the proposed SAVE America Act is just that unreasonable.  For each conviction for fraud, thousands—87,500—would be hindered from voting.  In short, the solution is many times worse than the problem—a clear symptom of an ID malady.

 

In practical terms, the proposed legislation would accomplish this disenfranchisement by making registering and voting expensive or inconvenient or both.  The central requirement of prospective voters to provide proof of identification places unreasonable demands on millions of people who do not have a passport, a birth certificate, or a government-issued photo identification.  Many cannot afford passports ($165) or birth certificates (around $10) or cannot obtain them (birth certificates never issued, lost, destroyed, remote); many have documents which are inconsistent (a woman’s name on a birth certificate might not match her name on a passport or driver’s license because of a name change at marriage).  For all, these requirements can be burdensome; for the poor, these costs amount to a poll tax.

 

Given the basic inanity of the SAVE America Act, the question is why Republicans—locally, surely among others, Rebecca Dow—support such an absurd legislative proposal.  There is only one answer: the desire to disenfranchise the millions of poor, minority, handicapped, or women voters who they believe vote for Democrats.  Which is to say, as we know, that Republicans are anti-democratic (lower-case d) types who believe that government rests on the consent of some, not all, of the governed because they do not believe that all people are created politically equal.

 

Since the end of World War II, the German government has outlawed the Nazi, communist, and similar parties.  Yet Germany is still regarded as a democracy.  Perhaps the best hope for the continued success of democracy in America is a ban on the Republican and associated parties.  For now, the best that we can do is to vote Republicans or at least Republicans like Rebecca Dow out of office and not vote them into office in the first place.  Denying them political power is exactly what they deserve for trying to deny political power to others.