It’s years beyond time this nation ended the farce about fraudulent voting by non-citizens.
Although the House narrowly capitulated on the SAVE America Act, we hope and expect this legislation to fail in the Senate.
We would love to see a majority of senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, acknowledge that there is no real issue with non-citizens voting, with numbers of actual instances so low they wouldn’t sway a small town’s council race, much less a national election.
This non-issue has been used as a veritable boogeyman ever since our current president refused to admit he lost the 2020 election. He has continued to undermine confidence in this nation’s election system and integrity.
What is hard to fathom is that so many people continue to buy into the lies that have been debunked time and again by election officials and judges of both political parties.
This push for the SAVE America Act is nothing more than a push to stoke fears about the coming mid-term elections and find ways to try to drive down the number of Americans who can participate in the most fundamental and constitutional way in this democracy.
The most harmful parts of this act are the requirements for voters to prove citizenship when registering to vote with documents than many citizens either don’t have or don’t have easy access to.
Were fraudulent voting a real problem, that could make more sense, but this is a made-up problem that threatens to disenfranchise voters.
We have faith in the integrity of our local County Clerk’s Offices and Elections Departments; so too should the people around the state and around the country have faith in theirs.
Our legislators and the courts also must stop any attempt to nationalize voting — with limits on such things as mail-in ballots — because the intent is nefarious. It is meant to harm access to voting among eligible Americans in service to a political goal. It is un-American.
People who have succumbed to the bombardment of lies about the integrity of our voting system and the supposed “fixes” that will save it need to understand their constitutional rights are just as at risk.