As it sometimes happens in primary elections, there is not much to vote for this coming Tuesday in many places. There are a few scattered contested races, but this has all the markings of a low-turnout election. Many voters will be thinking why bother.
But maybe we should vote for the simple reason that we still can. Between Donald Trump’s earlier SAVE act and the more draconian and mis-named SAVE America Act and the recent Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, our right to vote is under attack.
This continued assault on voting rights is part of Trump’s ad nauseam Looney Tunes claim that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from him. Aside from his true believers, no reasonable person believes that. An army of federal judges — including Trump appointees — have consistently rejected any notion there was anything corrupt or unfair about Trump’s defeat.
Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, recently wrote that Trump’s proposed election legislation “would stop millions of American citizens from voting. It would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress. It is Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.”
The SAVE America Act would require voters to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, disenfranchising 21 million Americans who do not have easy access to either of those documents. Married women and others who have changed their names would find it especially tough to register or reregister to vote.
As usual, Trump continues to telegraph his punches, telling podcaster Dan Bongino in February, “We should take over the voting, the voting, in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” That, of course, would violate the United States Constitution, which clearly gives the power to conduct elections to the states.
That same month, Trump’s FBI seized the 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Ga., where Trump infamously urged the secretary of state to “find” him the votes he needed to turn around his loss in that state. And he continues to threaten to send troops to the polls, which would unlawfully intimidate prospective voters.
For now, Trump’s voting legislation has been stalled in the United States Senate, but we know he is relentless if nothing else. In the meantime, his mid-census redistricting campaign to give Republicans an advantage in the upcoming congressional races has just been green-lighted by the Supreme Court.
In its recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the court has continued its campaign to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, striking down a congressional map that created a second majority Black district in Louisiana. State lawmakers can now more freely draw legislative district maps that dilute the value of the vote of minority voters.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissenting opinion, called this the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” which has been the “crown jewel” of civil rights since 1965.
If I am ever tempted to stay home on Election Day because there are no real contests on the ballot, I only have to remember the images of those proud Iraqi voters in 2005 who had dipped their fingers in purple ink to show that they had voted in a free election for the first time in 50 years. That always gets me to the polls.
