Happy Fourth of July everyone! Happy 250th Birthday to the country!
Today I want to talk about punching yourself in the face.
Yesterday, President Trump braved a hailstorm to address the nation from Mount Rushmore. Undeterred by God’s seeming disapproval, Trump assured us that if the Senate Republicans will just do two things (eliminate the legislative filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act), the GOP will not lose its majorities for a 100 years.
He thinks this sounds like a good thing and perhaps he also believes it, although he only really gives a shit about avoiding investigations and possible impeachment from Democratic majorities over the last two years of his presidency.
Does the SAVE America Act have the potential to turn America into a de facto one-party state?
No. It does not. But it would disenfranchise a lot of voters.
The primary way it would do this is by making it more difficult to register to vote. It introduces a Mandatory Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) for voter registration. As the League of Women Voters explains, this excludes standard drivers licenses (even the REAL ID variety in 45 states) because they don’t certify citizenship. The upshot is that people will need to produce either a U.S. passport or a physical copy of their birth certificate.
Guess who doesn’t have passports. People in red states, particularly in the South.
In seven states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport: West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
Guess who does have passports.
Only in four states do more than two-thirds of citizens have a valid passport: New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey.
More Latinos have passports than whites. A higher percentage of young people than old people hold passports. The more education you have, the more likely it is that you hold a passport. Fewer than one in four Americans with a high school degree or less have a passport compared to 71 percent of those with a postgraduate degree.
A passport requirement hurts the GOP relative to the Democrats with every racial, socioeconomic or regional group you can think of except Blacks who have the lowest level of passport ownership.
The Republicans do better with the birth certificate half of DPOC. This is because women so often use a different name from the one on their certificate. New versions of the SAVE act would allow women to get past this obstacle by signing an affidavit, kind of like casting a provisional ballot. This would still deter some women from registering or voting, but also limit how effectively the bill would suppress the female vote.
On the whole, the DPOC requirement would skew the electorate so it is less southern, less white, less Black, less working class, and less uneducated. For Democrats this is highly objectionable on ideological and civil rights grounds, but not on electoral outcome grounds.
A bill that disproportionately favors Latinos and northern, well-educated, urban and suburban, progressional class folks is designed to help the Democrats win elections, not the Republicans.
The Republicans and the president are in denial about this. But the main reason why they think the SAVE Act would be good for them is that they believe they’re losing elections due to non-citizens voting. This is not true. It’s possible they have never lost a single election anywhere on any level because of a non-citizen voting.
A database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation looking at data spanning back to 2000, identifies fewer than 100 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting nationwide. A 2016 Brennan Center for Justice study found that election officials nationally referred only 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution in that year. The suspected (not even proven) noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001% of the total ballots cast.
The reason noncitizen voting is so rare is because it is illegal, carries serious criminal penalties, and simply isn’t worth the risk. If the SAVE Act were successful in reducing noncitizen voting to zero, it would not help (or hurt) the Republicans in any way.
Therefore, the only question is how the bill’s massive disenfranchisement of eligible voters might change election outcomes. The Republicans would benefit from fewer Black votes and a more male electorate, but this advantage would be swamped by the effect on the white working class, particularly in the South and Midwest where passport ownership is lower than on the coasts.
The Democrats already have an advantage because the highest level of passport ownership is with Latinos, young people, people who have college (especially advanced) degrees, people in the north, people in the cities and people in the suburbs. These groups heavily favor the Dems over the Republicans.
The Democrats know this and yet they are not leaping to support the SAVE America Act. This is because the party is devoted to civil rights, including for women and Blacks, and because it doesn’t seek to win elections by excluding people from the franchise. Even if the Dems had the power to craft legislation that would help them by disproportionately disenfranchising right-leaning voters, they would not exercise it.
Ironically, the original Republican plan, to focus on photo ID only, actually was perfectly designed to help the GOP. This is because people who lack a photo ID entirely are primarily the urban poor, especially minorities, who do not drive or use banks where a photo ID is required. And the people whose current name or address doesn’t match their photo ID are primarily young people (particularly college students) and women (who have gotten married and changed their name) who prefer the Democrats.
By replacing this mode with a mode requiring either a passport or birth certificate, the Republicans have crafted a voter suppression plan to hurt themselves. They are doing everything they can to punch themselves in the face.
Normally, I’d advocate letting them do this, but I am not in favor of disenfranchising anyone for political advantage. I just find it flabbergasting that the GOP wants to do this to solve a nonexistent problem.
Happy July 4th. Go America!
Happy No Kings Day!
😳