Are Republicans really trying to block women from voting and bring back segregation-era Jim Crow laws? That’s how major Democratic politicians, from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL), have framed new GOP election security legislation, the SAVE Act, that’s advancing through Congress.
But it’s not just elected officials: progressive influencers are running a wall-to-wall misinformation campaign across social media, attempting to scare Americans with a false perception of this legislation.
Viral tweets suggested that the goal of the bill is to “silence women” and “make it harder for [them] to vote.” That’s not all: The left-wing content creator “Good Trouble” told his 2.1 million followers that the SAVE Act was a “disgustingly transparent attempt to steal the election for Donald Trump.” Meanwhile, the TikTok influencer “Spencewuah,” who boasts an astonishing 18 million followers, directly compared the legislation to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
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These are just a few examples, but all across the various social media platforms, left-wing voices are warning about the supposedly dire threat the SAVE Act poses to our democracy.
There’s just one problem: None of this rhetoric has any basis in reality. I realized that when I took 20 minutes to do something none of these “influencers” apparently bothered to do: read the SAVE Act.
Part of it is really not that controversial. It would institute a photo ID requirement nationwide to vote in federal elections. Voters can satisfy this requirement with a driver’s license, state ID, tribal ID, military ID, or other government-issued ID. (School IDs will not suffice under the legislation.) Progressives often insist that requiring ID to vote is somehow racist and punishes poor people. But 83% of the public supports voter ID, including 71% of Democrats, and it’s hardly stopped minorities from voting in the dozens of states that already require it.
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It’s the other part of the SAVE Act that’s led to the most confusion and speculation. It also requires that when someone registers to vote, they provide proof of citizenship. A US passport or birth certificate can satisfy this requirement, but many have suggested that this will disenfranchise people who don’t have these documents or who, for example, married women, have changed their names so that their current documentation no longer matches their birth certificate.
This is where much of the “Handmaid’s Tale” and “disenfranchising minorities and women” rhetoric comes from. Yet anyone without a copy can simply order their birth certificate from the government and have it sent to them for $10 to $30. And the latest version of the SAVE Act creates a process by which any married woman can register to vote, even with a mismatched name, if they simply sign an affidavit testifying to their name change.
As a result, this won’t meaningfully suppress the voting among married women. Yet even if it somehow did, that still wouldn’t remotely constitute “rigging the election for Trump” — because married women are a Republican-leaning voting block!
Critics have a point when they argue that documented voter fraud is already incredibly rare, and even red states like Utah, which have audited their voting systems, have found almost zero non-citizen voting.
But collapsing trust in our elections is a crisis, and if these new security measures can bolster people’s confidence in our elections without imposing an unreasonable burden on people trying to vote, that doesn’t sound so bad to me — and it certainly doesn’t sound like Jim Crow 2.0.
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After all, that’s what Democrats, including then-president Joe Biden, said about Georgia’s 2021 voting law changes, too… only for voter turnout in Georgia to shatter records in the 2024 election. And that’s the problem with crying wolf. One day, there might actually be one, but no one is going to believe you.
If “influencers” want their audiences to ever take their political complaints seriously, they should stop uncritically parroting propaganda — and save the doomsday rhetoric for when the world is actually ending.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
