US President Donald Trump, on Friday, February 13, threatened to try to bypass Congress and force new voting laws ahead of the November midterm elections, where his Republican Party fears losing control of the legislature. Trump said he would soon issue an executive order attempting to impose the rules if Congress does not pass a law requiring photo identification to vote and other nationwide reforms.
Any attempt would likely be met by a legal challenge that could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. “There will be Voter ID for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he wrote.
While many jurisdictions across the United States require photo ID to cast ballots, not all do, with Trump and many Republicans arguing without evidence that those areas have permitted significant voter fraud.
The Trump-backed “SAVE America” election reform act passed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives this week. However, it is expected to fail in the Senate, where the Republican majority is too slim to pass the law without Democratic support.
In addition to requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot, the bill would also require proof of citizenship to register to vote. There is no evidence of meaningful fraud in US elections and critics say that the bill’s measures would instead push millions of people away from casting ballots, because they don’t have a passport or a paper copy of their birth certificate.
In the US, issuance of a photo ID is neither guaranteed nor free for all citizens. There is no simple registry for citizens within the US (unless you count the Social Security number which is incredibly flawed). While things such as driver’s licenses and passports serve as defacto identification, they are not universally held by everyone (fees are required for both, not everyone owns a vehicle, not everyone travels internationally). This also applies to home addresses and other proxies for voter identification, since they are generally insufficient in restrictive states.
Additionally, things such as voter roll purges and additional burdens placed on the participant (such as removing mail-in opportunities, since election day is not a holiday) tend to have the effect of excluding voters from participation, especially in lower-income communities who are unable to afford to take time off or go through the additional hurdles.
Throw on top of that the surveillance state apparatus and general distrust from the public regarding further extending our personal lives to the federal government since (and perhaps before) the 2001 Patriot Act, and you can see why a lot of people are not a fan of this push. The Real ID fiasco in the 2010s is a good example of outspoken pushback throughout implementation.
sidenote: a lot of the requirements for registration are put in place by GOP leaders to fuck over democratic party voter bases. An automatic registration system would be awesome, but no red tie would fuckin’ vote for it because it would doom their ability to have selective representation in their districts.
For those in poverty and without cars, trying to get somewhere to get an ID made can take a large amount of time and non-zero amount of money (even if just in trying to get to a DMV/BMV/DPS office) that they may not otherwise have.
Exactly.