If the powerful wanted us to vote they’d make it as easy as possible.
The SAVE America Act that recently passed the House and is now under consideration in the Senate is a solution in search of a problem. The act purports to protect elections from ineligible voters, illegal immigrants, and other nefarious actors, real or imagined, alive or dead. It’s bullshit legislation based on Donald Trump’s endless lies about election fraud, an allegation that expert after expert, study after study concludes to be either nonexistent, negligible or infinitesimal.
The Regime’s aim is to shrink the electorate by disenfranchising voters, even some who typically vote Republican. As reported by CAP on January 26, 2026:
“This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.”
The authors of this bogus legislation knew what they were doing. It’s not by accident that they specify documents that many Americans don’t possess.
When it comes to analyzing the deep damage Donald Trump has done to America during his decade-long rampage against the Constitution, rule of law, democratic norms and decency, perhaps nothing is as consequential as his delegitimization of our elections. Until Trump lumbered upon the stage, Americans and their political leaders generally accepted the conduct and results of elections. There were challenges in tight races, recounts, and some legal action, but when those processes concluded the results were accepted and people moved on. Trump cried fraud when he lost in 2020, but not when he won in 2024. Heads I win, tails you lose has been part of Trump’s MO for years. As evident in recent reporting, Trump is already claiming the 2026 midterms will be marred by fraud, and thus has demanded unconstitutional changes to election procedures and ordered his minions in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.
If that fails, the Regime appears more than prepared to send armed and masked federal agents to intimidate voters in blue state precincts, in the same way the KKK terrorized Black voters in the early years of Reconstruction.
The bottom line is that the midterms are looking like a blowout, not because the electorate suddenly perceives Democrats as competent and trustworthy, but because the Regime’s policies are clearly disastrous for all but the very wealthy. If you can’t compete on your record, policies or ideology to hold political power, you do the next logical thing which is to cheat, to rig the process, to depress voter turnout, and to disenfranchise as many potential voters as possible.
For nearly all of America’s 250-year history, the wealthy and powerful have never wanted the commoners to vote. Like the famous line, “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, which excluded Native Americans and Blacks and women, our democracy has long been more muted than full-throated, limited rather than expansive. Property ownership, poll taxes, literacy tests, and straight-up intimidation by thugs long served to deny people the franchise. Women agitated, organized, marched and protested for more than 70 years before they finally won the right to cast a ballot. But even today, after women have been voting for over a century, some on the radical right argue for their being stripped of the franchise.
If the powerful wanted us to vote they’d make it as easy as possible. Election Day would be a national holiday; registering to vote would be easy, not a bureaucratic obstacle course.
I remember a time when the United States routinely lectured other nations about free and fair elections. Our tradition of accepting election results and peacefully transferring political power was exalted as the gold standard, perhaps the one thing that justified our hubris and self-regard, our lusty American Exceptionalism. This belief began to unravel when the Supreme Court interfered in the 2000 presidential election, and has become a farce in the Trump Era.
