Quick Hits About the SAVE Act

Been seeing this SAVE Act spin in a lot of places so let’s get some things straight:

No one thinks that women CAN’T get the appropriate documents together to prove citizenship at the voting booth as the SAVE Act requires.

Nobody thinks that women are incapable.

But to require women to jump through extra hoops is unfair and will disenfranchise some voters.

To require anyone, regardless of gender, to jump through extra hoops and pay additional fees for copies of these documents, to take to the voting booth, even though they have already proven citizenship in order to register to vote, will disenfranchise voters as an unconstitutional poll tax.

The SAVE Act also calls for punishment of election monitors and poll workers who mess up these requirements. So election monitors will be more likely to turn away voters, and that will disenfranchise voters.

All of this to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist in the magnitudes that SAVE Act creators would have you believe. Voter fraud has been investigated over and over again and only a handful of cases have been found, mostly on the Republican side. And the registration process already has safeguards in place to prevent non-citizens from voting.

And just for the record, no one is actually against voter ID, but if you require that it has to be automatically available. Once you register to vote, it has to be sent out immediately via mail, for free, and in an expedited manner, there should be no extra effort needed to actually get it in order to use it. Anything less than that is a poll tax.

The SAVE Act as it is now is unconstitutional. The fact that the House passed it is proof that the leadership doesn’t care about the Constitution after all. The Senate is full of Republicans who claim to support it but not enough to override the filibuster. They know it is an unnecessary burden for a made-up problem. Don’t fall for the bootstraps spin.

Why am I talking about this? Because we know that civic engagement and educated voting leads to better health outcomes. So being able to vote freely is better for my patients.