Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to withhold his signature from all bills until Congress passes a GOP-led voting bill that implements voter restrictions ahead of the November midterms.
“I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION – GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY – ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The bill, called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, requires individuals to show citizenship documents to register to vote and strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. If passed, the legislation would also administer criminal penalties for election officials who register anyone lacking the required documents.
As my colleague Ari Berman wrote in February, the bill would potentially block tens of millions of Americans from voting. Nine percent of American citizens, or approximately 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents. The bill may impact millions of US citizens in other ways: tens of millions of women who took their partner’s last name, for example, may not have a birth certificate that matches their legal name could find it more difficult to register.
Thank you for your answer!
But is there a register, somewhere that @gloog@fedia.io is a person that was born in Your-city/Your-state and is a US national? So, even if you don’t need to show an ID to prove you are indeed gloog, can a gloog be in the registered voters list if they are not a US citizen?
I’m asking because I read from other posts that the process to get a passport or even a birth or marriage certificate seem to be relatively complex, while here you can basically download your marriage certificate online. But this relies on the fact that there are City and Nation-wide databases that have a record of a person with my name being born in X, a Y national, married with Z and father of W. So if I can prove my identity as andallthat, all these other things (including nationality) follow almost “for free”, or at least more easily.
So I was wondering if the key difference might not be proving Citizenship per se, but the fact that records are not centralized and it’s harder to go quickly from “I am this person” to “this person is a US National”?
There isn’t one centralized database with that information for everyone. Each state, and even inside one state each county, maintains their own records, so someone who is born in Florida, gets married in California, and then has a kid born in Oregon would need to contact each of those states for proof of those events if they lost the original copies for whatever reason. There is a national system that can (mostly) check against those state and local level records, but it also has limitations. Passports and birth certificates can be proof of citizenship, but don’t prove where you live at the time of the election even if you do have one on hand.
The voter registration process already gives the state enough information to determine whether an individual is eligible to vote in that state. For federal elections (which are still run by the states, just for federal level positions), that includes confirming that the person is a citizen, but each state is able to decide whether to allow noncitizen residents to vote on local government issues or not.