How Trump Could Use the SAVE Act to Steal the Midterms (It's not just the IDs)

Something I learned fighting the Chicago machine a long time ago.

There’s lots of ways to steal elections, but it helps to be the ones running them. You can steal elections just by selectively applying otherwise legitimate rules. Handing DHS control over who qualifies as a citizen gives them tools that they could selectively apply to blue areas or to individuals based on their party or social media content! The SAVE Act may not pass, but we must prepare to fight now in case it does.

---

How They Steal Elections

Back in the 1990’s, I worked on city council elections for progressive candidates running against the Chicago machine. Each ward (city council district) had an alderman who was like a king, with sole control over decisions on their turf, particularly about zoning and construction. This made life easy for real-estate developers: they had only one vote to win over (or buy). This particular race was for alderman of a ward that was ground-zero in the gentrification wars: a working-class Hispanic community doomed to become one of the trendiest neighborhoods in America. My then $350/month apartment on a sketchy block now lives in the shadow of a Mercedes-Benz dealership. We lost, despite polling at over 60% going into the election. So what happened?

My candidate was a community lawyer. Our opponent was the pawn of a soon-to-be-indicted Congressman. The total vote was only around 13,000, allowing organizers on both sides to contact virtually every voter, find out who they were supporting, and make sure they showed up. We ran an aggressive absentee ballot program and knew that more than a thousand of our votes had been mailed in. The Board of Elections (headed by allies of said Congressman) checks that the signature on the outside of the sealed ballot envelope matches the signature on the voter registration files. Somehow, our signatures must have been subjected to a higher standard, because nearly all of our voters’ ballots were rejected. I couldn't prove anything, but it was a very valuable lesson. If the people running the election want you to lose, there’s a lot they can do just by selectively applying laws that are otherwise perfectly legit.

Thank you for reading Reframing America! My work is completely financed by subscribers like you! All content is free, but many people choose to become paying subscribers to help support this mission of improving our messaging! Use this link to subscribe or upgrade! Thank you!

Selective Application of the Law

Under the SAVE Act, to register to vote, people must show forms of identification that millions of Americans don’t have access to or can’t afford. This is bad enough in itself. A similar law was tried in Kansas with disastrous results:

“A federal judge struck down the law within a few years, after it was found to have blocked tens of thousands of eligible voters from registering while catching fewer than thirty noncitizens trying to do the same.”

Some have pointed out that Republican voters may be more impacted than Democratic voters, but that assumes that the law will be applied the same way to everyone.

The worst part of the SAVE Act is that it allows the Department of Homeland Security to determine who qualifies as a citizen. States have to send their voter data to the DHS who will compare it with other states, identify people who are supposedly unqualified and purge them from the rolls. There is no requirement to inform people. They will find out when they try to vote, far too late to provide or acquire the necessary proof. DHS will likely use the same wildly faulty A.I. riddled database that they are using to identify immigrants on ICE raids.

Geographic Targeting (like Florida in 2000)

This purge will undoubtedly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible American citizens. Worse, Trump and the DHS could easily choose to apply this process to Blue states only, or to Blue counties or precincts.

As I understand it, this is one of the ways they “won” the 2000 election in Florida. With punched paper ballots, every time you do a recount you find more votes, because with repeated handling, more of the little pieces of paper that are insufficiently punched through the punch cards (“hanging chads”) get dislodged, making those votes countable. Republicans pushed through additional recounts in counties that voted heavily for Bush and then sued to halt the counting. Had every county done the same number of recounts, Gore would have probably won.

Individual Targeting (with A.I. and NSPM-7)

Thanks to dangerous new technology, the Trump administration now has the capacity to identify politically opposed people as individuals. In addition to identifying people by party registration or whether they voted in Democratic primaries, they can now target people by what they say on social media or whether they protest ICE.

Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” defines as “domestic terrorists” anyone engaging in a wide range of actions many of which fall under constitutionally-protected speech. They have not said that they intend to use the data they are collecting under NSPM-7 to challenge people’s voter registration through the SAVE Act process. But they could. You prepare for what your opponent is capable of doing, not just what you think they are likely to do. (I can’t find the source of that saying. Sun Tzu? Jethro Gibbs?)

---

What to Do

Now that Trump has made the SAVE Act his top priority, it is possible that it may yet pass. Obviously, our elected officials must do everything they can to prevent that from happening. Meanwhile, election lawyers and States’ Attorneys General should prepare to sue to stop it from being enacted, or at absolute minimum, assure that if it is enacted, that it is applied equally and impartially to all. If the administration cannot agree to apply this law equally and impartially to all localities, and to ban its selective application based on personal data like voter registration or constitutionally protected speech, then we will take that as an admission that they plan to use it as a weapon against Blue states and voters. We should be prepared to monitor every step of the voter file purge process and scream bloody murder at the first sign of selective application.

How to Frame This

Republicans are attempting to sell this bill as a mere voter ID requirement. The fact that millions of Americans do not have access to the required proof of citizenship is still the number one message, but it becomes much more urgent when people know that even if they are currently registered, they may be purged and have to re-register AND that they may only discover this when they show up to vote. They also need to know that the purges will be done using extremely inaccurate databases, meaning that anyone, anywhere, could be thrown off the rolls. These messages take priority as they appeal to the concerns of every voter regardless of political leaning.

We must also make the case that Trump is obsessed with this bill because he is terrified that the Republicans are going to lose the midterm elections, which means that he believes that this bill will disproportionately impact Democrats, which suggests that he may be intending to use the SAVE Act to prevent millions of Democrats from voting. Why is this a credible argument?

We cannot trust Trump or ICE to decide who should be allowed to vote. Trump and DHS have a track record of abusing their authority: they cannot be trusted to apply the laws equally and without political bias.

They have made a series of statements that reveal their intentions. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said:

“When it gets to election day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Trump said that, if the bill passes, Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years and maybe longer.” Trump also said that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize elections” in 15 states.

We’ve all heard and talked about these statements, but we haven’t woven them into a coherent story for the American public about how these statements clearly suggest their intent to use the SAVE Act to suppress the Democratic vote. We should be asking Trump why he thinks Democrats won’t win another election for fifty years if it passes, why he said that Republicans should take over and nationalize elections (as opposed to the federal government) and which fifteen states he is talking about. We can safely assume they would be blue states, because Trump already has an extensive track record of selectively applying all sorts of law enforcement and spending/withholding decisions based on party affiliation, voting history or political speech.

A few small notes on messaging details:

It is okay to use “ICE” to represent DHS as a whole, to associate the SAVE Act with the parts of DHS being used to exercise power arbitrarily on Trump’s behalf. Also, when you do talk about DHS, use “Department of Homeland Security” or just “Homeland Security.” Acronyms do not activate negative associations like whole words do.

Do not use “federal government” takeover as an attack, because the federal government is not inherently bad. It’s who’s in charge that matters. This is a “Trump takeover” or a “Republican takeover” and that is bad because they cannot be trusted to not abuse their power for political advantage.

---

Election laws must be applied the same way everywhere. In our struggle against all forms of voter suppression, we should be doing more to ferret out and fight these disparities such as providing fewer voting machines and creating longer lines in minority precincts. Every eligible voter must be, not just able, but equally able to cast their vote and have their vote counted.

Thank you so much for reading this. I hope it is of use to you in your work and activism!

In solidarity, always,

Like this post, but not ready to become a paying subscriber? Leave me a tip of any amount you like at my tip jar! Thank you!

Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647‬

NOTES

See my recent post for more messaging on why our right to vote is essential to our freedom, as well as Trump’s voter suppression efforts and his mission to, among other things, distract from the Epstein files.