The S(L)AVE Act

Another Set of Election Suppression Shackles

Image by Andy Helfrich

Media talking heads are calling the so-called SAVE AMERICA bill that has moved from the U.S. House to the Senate a solution in search of a problem. That’s putting it mildly. For women and citizens of color, it’s easy to see that the problem for the MAGA majority who drafted and passed this bill in the House is this: they don’t want elections at all, especially not free and fair ones. They want ongoing and absolute control. So—hoping we’re too dumb to notice—they do things to make it harder for women and non-white people to access the ballot. And in doing so, they seek to disenfranchise whole segments of the citizenry in the hopes of subjugating them to stay in power. You know—like in the grand old days of slavery... or at the very least before women got the right to cast a vote.

In this case, the massuhs’ justification for suppressing peoples’ rights winds itself up on the pretext that there’s a shocking lot of voter fraud out there. One teensy snag in that logic, though, is that all the MAGA hoohah about voter fraud by immigrants (substitute: aliens, cats, dead people, Democrats, and/or double-trans-drug dealers) has proven time and again to be a big can of ca-ca.

American women and voters of color are seeing it for what it is: another GOP Election Suppression Shackle.

The outcry about illegal aliens voting in federal elections is not supported by facts. As the League of Women Voters report: “Claims that noncitizen voting is a true threat capitalize on racism and fear to promote certain politicians’ agendas.”^[1] The Brookings Institute notes: “Voter fraud is miniscule in U.S. elections— Share of reported cases of fraud over the past 13 to 38 years is less than 1%.”^[2] And, by the way, Brookings uses data compiled over decades by (drum roll, please) the Heritage Foundation.

In every form of this bill that’s been drafted, the SLAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents—like a passport or birth certificate with a name that matches the name on their voter registration—to register and/or vote. Some versions want voters to show their papers every time they vote.

The bill’s proponents have come up with an acronym to gloss over the true intent of this requirement: DPOC. It stands for Documentary Proof Of Citizenship. Advocates claim that the sole premise of the bill is to ensure that only citizens vote. But these are two key facts that argue against it:

• Many eligible citizen voters don’t have access to DPOC

• There are better ways to verify citizenship that put the responsibility on the government, not voters.

Our RepubliCON controlled Congress—infected with Trumptransmitted election denial-disease and riddled with metastasized megalomania—can conjure copious spare time to try to control election results, but show little interest in actually governing the country and ensuring the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of the people. Or even getting justice for the crimes exposed in the Epstein Files. Or perhaps putting a new padlock on the U.S. Treasury to keep the kleptocrats from filching every last dime.

No, those now in power are laser focused on doing everything they can to make sure they stay on top. And so, to that end, they figure that clamping a cast iron collar on voter eligibility for certain sectors of the population might—among other things—reduce the tremendous impact women voters have on election outcomes. From Wikipedia: “There has been a notable gender gap in the United States at least since the 1980 presidential election. Women tend to favor Democratic candidates while men tend to favor Republican ones; the gap has ranged from 11 points in 1996 and 2016 to 4 points in 1992. The gap has been attributed to various causes, including a shifting of loyalty among men to the Republican Party and generally higher support for liberal positions among women. The effect of the gender gap is magnified by the fact that women vote in higher numbers than men.”^[3]

You think they don’t know that? I promise you, they know that.

Should the SLAVE Act pass in the Senate, more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the documents required, like a passport or birth certificate, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.^[4] And women, in particular, could experience an undue burden as a result of this legislation, especially if they changed their name when they married, or for any other reason. A woman is already traditionally given her father’s name as a surname when she is born in this country, which brands her patrilineally. If she takes another man’s name when she marries, she receives another patrilineal brand, (which—barring coincidence of same names—would be a different surname than her father’s). So, in order to prove her identity, she might need to carry her birth certificate and her marriage certificate, (both of which tie her to the men in her life...but that’s a whole other issue). But what if she changed her name legally? Or what if she divorced and took back her “maiden” name or took a different name for any other reason? More papers to carry. What if she/he/they came to this country with a matrilinear name by cultural heritage, and in the process of attaining citizenship was identified by their patrilinear name by the U.S. Government? The name on their birth certificate would then differ from that on their government-issued I.D. None of these examples are uncommon.

And it’s not only women who will be burdened by the requirement to prove identity under this proposed new legislation. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center:

• 9% of all eligible voters do not have, or do not have easy access to, documentary proof of citizenship

• 52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name

• 11% of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate

• Birth certificates often lack information that matches a person’s current identity^[5]

There’s other stuff that comes with this awful act—several unsavory add-ons. The Senate’s version not only requires these DPOCs to register, but also to vote, unless—get this—their state has been regularly handing over its voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security since June, 2025. This issue merits a whole essay of its own, but suffice to say (for now) that it seeks to collect and catalogue information about the populace as if we were chattel; and—especially in the hands of this current administration—risks federal election interference.

Let’s look at a few other unpleasant side-effects that might occur:

• For those who register and vote by mail, the SLAVE Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to be presented in person, which negates the benefits of mail registration.

• In its latest draft, the SLAVE Act lacks specificity about how DPOC should be submitted, ensuring some confusion across jurisdictions, and thereby giving local election officials authority to make high-stakes judgment calls about voters’ rights to cast a ballot—decisions that would be made without clear, universal guidelines. And the lack of clear guidelines would almost certainly guarantee overly cautious decisions, restricting more voters from access to the ballot.

• According to the Bipartisan Policy Center: “Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.”^[6]

Let’s look at the SLAVE Act with clear eyes. Consider this from The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom: “Stricter voter ID requirements are part of a more aggressive GOP strategy to question the validity of elections. The vote comes after the White House reopened investigations on an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, one of the central sites in President Donald Trump’s unfounded concerns of election fraud in 2020. Trump also recently said he wanted to ‘nationalize’ voting, and while he has been vague on what that means, it could include a federal override on states’ abilities to run their own elections — particularly in places where he lost to former President Joe Biden.”^[7]

The anti-voter provisions in the version the House passed are numerous, including, but not limited to:

• Requiring proof of citizenship and also proof of residence to register. According to the Brennan Center, “Roughly 9 percent of the population has moved within a state in the past year, but many will not update their driver’s licenses until they expire.”^[8]

• Requiring a much narrower list of photo ID than the laws do in nearly every state, prohibiting student IDs, and only allowing tribal IDs with expiration dates. Think about that. Tribal IDs do not contain expiration dates because you belong to the tribe until you expire, not your ID. Good grief!

• Mandating voter roll purges every 30 days, and ending the 90-day period that protects voters from being thrown off the rolls mistakenly right before Election Day. This will not only overwhelm the election system, it is rife with potential for error and/or deliberate deletion of voters from the rolls.

• And this: Prohibiting universal mail voting, a longstanding method of voting in eight states and Washington, DC.

Next up, the same criminal cabal calling themselves the Republican Party plans to push the “Make Elections Great Again Act”, which goes even further to impose federal control over elections than the SLAVE Act. This new manacle requires proof of American citizenship to register, and it allows the Department of Homeland Security to access voter rolls.^[9] It’s a GOP-fetter of a bill that would prohibit the counting of ballots received until after Election Day, ban ranked-choice voting for federal elections, and forbid voters from giving their sealed mail ballots to someone else for delivery. These irons and chains for free and fair elections were put forth by a plague of election deniers, including the shifty Squeaker of the House, who played a leading role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The drafters and supporters of the shackling SLAVE Act have proven themselves devious and demented, and there is no end to their rapacity, no limit to their depravity.

In every form, the SLAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. There is a bone-chilling ring to the phrase: Show me your papers that echoes Nazi Germany. As Jurist and columnist Margaret Hu of Duke University of Law says, “To understand the source of our cultural discomfort, all we need to do is watch Casablanca.”^[10]

We already see the murderous masked thugs dispatched to American cities by the Department of Homeland Security demanding papers from ordinary citizens. Quoting from Hu: “The main theme of the story, communicating the plight of the refugee, is conveyed in the opening scenes. The camera pans to the modern equivalent of an immigration raid as the police round up the political refugees and herd them into police vans, giving rise to another iconic line from Casablanca: ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ Next, we see an officer who stops a ‘suspected’ political refugee on the street and asks: ‘Can we see your papers?’ The refugee bolts and is shot in the back after the officer declares, ‘These papers expired three weeks ago!’ Within the context of unrestrained police powers, ‘your papers, please’ is wielded like a weapon.”^[11]

Rooted in racism and practiced by both parties for decades, voter suppression suddenly became an openly-embraced part of the GOP platform early in this decade, and is now called for as a shameless means to silence whole swaths of citizens. It is part of a new Nazism in the current regime, and they have moved even further to marry it to their attempts to seize and hold power in defiance of the constitution. Now the Trump Republiconspirators in the House and Senate are moving quickly to set up a system that seeks to shackle certain citizens’ right to vote and deprive them of that power. Together with a proactive campaign focused on reversing reproductive rights, dismantling diversity initiatives, and eliminating workplace protections for women, we see the rights of women and minorities slipping away. And the attempt to take over elections could well spell the death of democracy.

In the midst of this fast-moving tyrannical takeover, where most of the levers of power are in the hands of its henchmen in the RepubliCON party, we can’t, as Howard Zinn puts it in the title of his book, “be neutral on a moving train.”^[12] We must resist the shackling of our votes and our voices, we must continue to protest the otherism and the efforts to remold our country by the White Christian Nationalist/Nazists in this administration. As Governor J. B. Pritzker said in his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly of Illinois this month:

“Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity....and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”^[13]

Call your U.S. Senators today and tell them to vote no on the SLAVE Act. And tell them that when we go to the polls this year, our courage, our commitment to freedom and equality, the sheer volume of our voices speaking out against tyranny...is going to be off the chain.

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Here’s this week’s photo of Zuni, our ten-month-old wolf cub companion:

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^[1] League of Women Voters: https://www.lwv.org/blog/save-act-headed-senate-push-restrict-voting-access

^[2] Elaine Kamarck, How widespread is election fraud in the United States? Not very, Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-election-fraud-in-the-united-states-not-very/

^[3] Wikipedia, Voting Gender Gap in the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_gender_gap_in_the_United_States

^[4] Eliza Sweren-Becker and Owen Backskai, New Save Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans From Voting, February 9. 2026, Brennan Center for Justice, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

^[5] Wren Orey, Mattew Weil, Julianne Lempert, Five Things to Know About the SAVE America Act, February 2, 2026, Bipartisan Policy Center, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/

^[6] Five Things to Know About the SAVE America Act, Bipartisan Policy Center

^[7] Marissa Martinez, House passes elections overhaul bill that could make it harder for married women to vote, February 11, 2026, The 19th, https://19thnews.org/2026/02/house-passes-save-america-act-married-women-vote/

^[8] Eliza Sweren-Becker and Owen Backskai, New Save Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans From Voting

^[9] Annie Karni, Republicans, Braced for Losses, Push More Voting Restrictions in Congress, February 17, 2026, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/republicans-vote-fraud-id-midterms.html

^[10] Margaret Hu, “Show Me Your Papers” Laws and American Cultural Values, November 15, 2011, Jurist News, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2011/11/margaret-hu-immigration-papers/

^[11] Margaret Hu, “Show Me Your Papers”

^[12] Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Beacon Press Classics 2025

^[13] Sean Croawford, Read Gov. Pritzker’s State of the State and budget address, February 19, 2025, NPR Illinois, https://www.nprillinois.org/government-politics/2025-02-19/read-gov-pritzkers-budget-address