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Notes -
Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.
I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.
This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.
For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.
Is it really true that the SAVE act doesn’t count most state drivers licenses as acceptable ID’s?
In any case, Trump is more of a Marius than a Gracchus. Dirty tricks and proceduralism isn’t new here- he’s justifying it differently by ‘mandate from the people’.
Officially, every state is 'compliant' with the RealID act, but in practice every state but Washington has a non-RealID (aka 'non-enhanced') driver's license option. Almost every current driver will have had to get a renewal since the switchover, so at this point if you're not using a RealID that's by choice... but the paperwork overhead is genuinely annoying, and I can't find good numbers on how many non-RealID driver's licenses are being issued.
((Most states allow noncitizens to get a RealID-compliant card, but it's specifically marked 'non-citizen'. It's also not supposed to be issued to anyone without 'legal presence', though between the various messes and in-name-only compliance that's a bit flakier.))
"Enhanced" is different than "Real ID". Enhanced drivers licenses are kind of like passport cards issued by the state -- you can use them to cross the Canadian border by car (and on foot I think), and only 5 states can issue them.
Ah, thanks.
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