February 10 – Daily Jefferson County Union
The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act is back and Wisconsin’s own Rep. Bryan Steil has introduced in the House the “Make Elections Great Again” (MEGA) Act.
These bills appear to ensure that only citizens cast votes. In reality they construct hurdles to voting that particularly interfere with the voting rights of poor and minority citizen voters.
These bills mandate not only a photo ID for all voters in all elections, they also require that all voters present either a passport or original birth certificate each time they vote. Your Wisconsin Real ID driver’s license is not sufficient proof of citizenship.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that almost 10% of eligible voters (over 20 million) do not have access to these documents. People who changed their names when they married will be ineligible to vote because their current names will not match their birth certificate names and marriage licenses are not accepted documentation for this purpose. This disenfranchises further millions of voters, primarily married women.
These bills also require a centralized “voter surveillance” system in every state, bar states from accepting ballots received after election day (this after changing U.S. Postal Service procedures so that postmarks reflect date of processing and not date of receipt), and require frequent total purges of voter rolls, a process known to be rife with error.
Imagine showing up to vote only to be told you are no longer registered. Senators and representatives piously claim that these changes are needed to combat voter fraud, particularly the oft-repeated but nonetheless patently false claim that “millions” of non-citizens are voting in elections.
Organizations such as the Brookings Institute have presented data showing that voting fraud of any kind is extremely rare, and that voting by non-citizens is but a small fraction of those incidents.
Even the conservative Heritage Foundation’s own map of voter fraud cases shows how rare fraud in general is and how little of it is comprised of non-citizen voting.
These bills are “solutions in search of problems” that are really meant to suppress the votes of citizens who do not agree with the majority party’s policies. They intrude on states’ constitutionally-assigned rights to administer elections as they see fit.
Voting is a right, not a privilege; our representatives should be working to make it easier for citizens to vote, not harder.
Meg Waraczynski,
Town of Cold Spring
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