Let's Talk About Voter Suppression and the SAVE Act
The right to vote is sacrosanct...or, it should be.
And lo, the SAVE Act was passed through the House, and millions of people had their voting rights stripped away.
Voter suppression is a serious problem in the United States—in fact, it’s a major problem that infects many democratic countries. In a healthy democracy with a devotion to the rule of law, measures are in place to protect against it and ensure that citizens can exercise their rights come election season.
The United States is not a healthy democracy. It has been sickly and withering for quite some time now, but it is currently in the end stages of its disease.
The point of democracy is that the people are in charge, not the elected officials.
To have a functional democracy, citizens need to be able to engage freely with and steer the government the way they want it to go. They need to be able to cast their votes, speak their minds, and have their wishes taken seriously.
Putting barriers and extra hoops in their way is a common method of voter suppression in the United States.
For those who don’t know, the SAVE Act is a new bill that was brought before the House a few months ago. It requires that all people who register to vote must provide documented proof of citizenship or be purged from the voter rolls.
Now, on its face this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. We require identification here in Canada to register for voting, and we have a system of notifying people when and where to vote ahead of federal and provincial elections.
It seems pretty simple. Just provide proof of citizenship and be done with it.
For most of the voting population, it might not be much of a burden. But for several demographics, it creates a potential issue. The problem lies in the documentation.
If you have changed your legal name for some reason or another, you now have to go out of your way to obtain documentation to prove it.
If you’re a married woman who chose to take her husband’s name, you now have to prove that. If you’ve got your marriage license and proof of the change, cool. If you don’t, now you have to get it issued to you. That’s an added cost that other voters don’t have to deal with, which creates a level of unfairness.
If you’re transgender or non-binary, the issue is compounded by the fact that the U.S. government no longer recognizes your identity at all. Now, proving your citizenship might mean outing yourself to a hostile administration.
Trans and non-binary people might choose to avoid the entire thing and simply accept being disenfranchised for the sake of keeping themselves safe.
And given that the SAVE Act is not applied federally and requires all 50 States to create their own pathways of proving citizenship, your required documents and thus your protections may vary widely from State to State.
Not every State issues the same information on a marriage license. There is the potential for a lot of married women to wind up being locked out because they’re struggling to find acceptable proof.
It’s that ‘50 Countries in a Trenchcoat’ problem we’ve talked about before.
The "States' Rights" Idea Makes Citizenship Meaningless
I've heard it said that the United States is less a country and more of a loose federation of small countries under a single name. Little countries in a trench coat, if you will.
There’s this concept in political theory of Negative Liberty versus Positive Liberty.
Negative Liberty is the freedom from constraints on your behaviour; nobody interferes with your actions. It is passive, and it requires no enforcement.
Positive Liberty is an active liberty, granting you the ability to exercise your own free will. It is supposed to be actively protected, so there is no barrier in your way.
Freedom from, and freedom to. They aren’t quite the same thing, even if they sound similar.
It’s much the same as the concept of Negative versus Positive Rights. Negative Rights are restraints on what the government can do to you, and Positive Rights are the things the government must provide for you.
But there’s a loophole here. What the government provides on paper may not be provided in practice.
As an example, before the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, people with uteruses had the right to make decisions about their reproductive health without ‘excessive government restriction.’
The word ‘excessive’ carried a lot of weight.
States might have been forced to allow it up to a point, but they all had the ability to set their own regulations on the procedures and facilities where abortion might be carried out.
A person might have the ‘on paper’ right to seek an abortion, but ‘in practice’ there were barriers.
Perhaps there was only one clinic in their State that was available because of nonsense building regulations. They might have to drive four hours out of their way, they might have to sit through ultrasound scans and be made to listen to a fetal heartbeat, they might have a mandatory waiting period that could push them out of the window where abortion was legal in their State.
In short, they had the Negative Right to an abortion—the government was not stopping them from seeking one. But they did not have the Positive Right to it, because they were being locked out on technicalities.
This is sort of what’s happening with voting right now. Citizens technically have the right to vote in the United States, but there are numerous barriers in the way that make it difficult.
Voting is supposed to be a Positive Right, meaning that the government is supposed to ensure that you can do it without restriction. But now it is being treated as a Negative Right, as something they won’t stop you from doing, but won’t actively enforce.
When your ability to vote varies from State to State, then democracy is on shaky ground.
If it costs money or puts you in danger to register as a voter, then you don’t have the right to vote. At that point, it becomes a privilege.
The SAVE Act not only impacts people who might register to vote in the future, but puts at risk people who have been actively engaged in elections throughout their lives. It disenfranchises millions of American citizens and prevents many marginalized people from having a voice or being represented.
It’s important for every American to do their research and begin the process of obtaining the necessary documents and proof that their State requires. Start now, so you’ll be fully prepared in time for the midterms.
Assuming there even is an election at the midterms, or that it’s free and fair—questions that are up in the air at this point, even if the politicians are pretending otherwise right now.
Voting is supposed to be a right. It’s a sacred duty, a responsibility that people fought and bled and died to obtain, and far too many shirk and take for granted.
Democracy in the United States is dying of a thousand little bleeding cuts.
This bill is an open gash upon its face.
Solidarity wins.
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The word "sneaky" comes to mind. This administration gives me the ick. You know that slimy car salesman feel? That's the ick they give me.
The U.S. has never really been a democracy, with White male property owners being the only ones originally allowed to vote. And don’t even get me started on the electoral college. The founding fathers may have said they wanted no kings, but they themselves were privileged and designed our government only for people like them, the rest of us be damned. And now, look where we are, with empathy-deficient, selfish, coddled, Christofascist White male billionaires who like sniffing their own farts calling all the shots. How about a real Revolution that values *everyone*? Burn this exploitive system (including capitalism) to the ground and replace it with a *real* democracy, one that actually lives up to the “America! Fuck yeah!” propaganda we’re bombarded with in school.