Defeat the SAVE Act, Expose MAGA Lies

SenateFederal LevelHouseTop Action

Mar 17

Written By Anna Krasner

Call BOTH of your Senators.

Featured

Senator Adam Schiff

DC Office: 202-224-3841

Email (use your own words): Sen. Schiff’s email contact form

Senator Alex Padilla

SF Office: (415) 981-9369

DC Office: (202) 224-3553

Email (use your own words): Sen. Padilla’s email contact form

Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

Thank you for standing against the corrupt SAVE Acts in all of their various versions. They are blatant efforts to suppress voting by legally-registered poor, nonwhite, senior, and student voters. We stand with you. Hold fast, stay strong.

If MAGA Republicans in the Senate go ahead with their threat to "take over" the Senate floor to jam the bill through, you must expose it for the undemocratic stunt that it is. Organize the Senate Democratic Caucus to "pass" a shadow voting bill that shows in simple bullet points what real voting-rights legislation should consist of by addressing gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation, and dark-money legalized bribery.

Background

The MAGA regime's “bombast & bullshit” media machine is using outright lies and distortions to gin up political support for their voter-suppression SAVE Act (or SAVE America Act). They falsely claim that noncitizens, and unregistered voters, are committing widespread voter fraud. This is completely untrue and has been proven false by their own official investigations.

Illegal voting by noncitizens is already barred by law in all national and state elections. As researched by the Bipartisan Policy Center – actual occurrences of illegal voting are infinitesimally small. While illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, voter suppression and election rigging is actually quite common. And also quite legal, particularly in Red states where many of the SAVE Act provisions have already been imposed by state law. Gerrymandering, onerous voter ID requirements that target Democratic-leaning demographic groups, manipulation of election resources to make voting inconvenient in Democratic-leaning urban precincts, limiting mail and early voting that aid voters with long commutes from their workplace to their polling place, and other tactics designed to discourage primarily Democrats from voting.

Partisan election-manipulation tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression are rooted in the historic reality that different demographic groups tend to favor different political parties. Decades of returns show that poor, nonwhite, senior, and student voters tend to vote for Democratic Party candidates when they are allowed to vote (and when they choose to vote). The various SAVE Acts are all unconstitutional, partisan voter suppression laws designed to pare down and discourage voters who historically lean towards the Democratic Party.

Republican legislatures in Red states, for example, use those historic voting patterns to gerrymander districts so that in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, where state-wide offices are decided one way or the other by very narrow margins, two-thirds to three-quarters of the state and federal district elections are won by the GOP. The goal of the SAVE Act, and the many similar state laws already on the books, is to skew who can vote in ways that favor the GOP.

Various versions of the SAVE Act have passed the House on Republicans-only party-line votes. But Democratic senators, including both Padilla and Schiff, filibustered to block those bills in the Senate. At the present time, Senate Republicans do not have enough support in their own party to amend the filibuster rules and prevent a Democratic filibuster. So they are threatening to "take over" the Senate floor and blockade all legislative votes to bring Senate business to a standstill. Their intention is to pressure the eight or so Democratic senators whose votes helped Republicans end Democratic filibusters and pass the Republican budget bills to cave in again – this time on voting rights.