When the U.S. House passed the SAVE Act last year, historians told us it was Congress’ worst attack on voting rights ever. Well, this week the House approved an even worse one.
The SAVE America Act takes the SAVE Act’s documentary proof of citizenship requirement, and adds a nationwide voter ID mandate, potentially disenfranchising millions. Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Democracy Docket’s Yunior Rivas highlighted the lies — Democrats “want illegals to vote,” Speaker Mike Johnson declared that morning — the GOP wheeled out to push for the measure. And afterwards, Democracy Docket’s Jim Saksa exclusively revealed that a former Trump campaign staffer and election denier who worked to advance the infamous 2020 “fake elector” scheme wrote parts of the original SAVE Act, which also made it into SAVE America.
The bill’s prospects in the Senate, where Democrats plan to filibuster it, currently appear dim. But that could change. And, as Jim reported, Trump ended the week by pledging that if the measure doesn’t make it to his desk, he’ll issue an executive order to achieve its goals — as well as perhaps banning mail voting. Of course, a decree like that would probably be blocked by the courts. But even savvy observers have often been wrong before when they’ve expressed confidence before that a Trump gambit to undermine democracy can’t succeed. So let’s just say we aren’t going to let our guard down.
Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson covered the week’s other big news: the unsealing of the affidavit that the FBI used to get a judge to sign off on its shocking recent raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, elections building, in which it seized ballots and other voting materials. As Democracy Docket’s Ashley Cleaves and Matt Cohen explained, the filing unsurprisingly revealed that the case was built on the very same conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that President Donald Trump and his allies have been pushing publicly for years, and that have comprehensively debunked numerous times. The only question, as Yunior reported in a followup, is how a judge signed off on it. A Democrat on the state’s election board called the decision to do so “an absolute travesty.”
Meanwhile. Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice has been tracking events in Utah, where the GOP is pushing a ballot measure that would repeal the state’s gerrymandering ban, allowing it to grab all four congressional seats for itself. But things aren’t going great for the scheme: Republicans fired Patriot Grassroots, the firm with ties to Donald Trump Jr. they’d hired to circulate petitions for the measure, amid allegations that it forged many of the signatures it turned in and misled voters. We’re about to find out whether they got enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot — and Jen will have more this week on Patriot Grassroots, which is active in other Republican-backed anti-democracy efforts beyond Utah.
Jacob also has been monitoring appearances by Trump administration officials at congressional hearings. He caught Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Todd Lyons admitting, in response to a question from a Democratic senator, that there’s “no reason” for his agency to be at voting sites this fall. That’s worth having on the record, given Trump’s wish to “take control of the voting,” and Steve Bannon’s claim that ICE will “surround the polls”.
And Jacob followed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before a House panel. His report detailed how Bondi’s reflexive strategy of offering insults rather than responses derailed the hearing, much of which focused on the Departments of Justice’s (DOJ) mishandling of the Jefferey Epstein scandal. But it also called out Democrats for failing to ask a single question about voting issues, despite the Bondi DOJ’s all-out assault on access to the ballot.
A centerpiece of that assault has been the department’s unprecedented bid to grab voter roll data from all 50 states — and Matt reported that ruby-red West Virginia became the latest state to tell DOJ to pound sand. In fact, a growing number of GOP elections chiefs are joining their Democratic counterparts in pushing back against the effort, emphasizing how it utterly tramples on states’ constitutional right to run their own elections.
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