New Hampshire finds out what it is to be SAVEd
A foretaste of voting restrictions
Brooke Yonge, from Derry, New Hampshire recently went to vote in a local election and was prevented from doing so. New Hampshire now requires proof of citizenship to vote, and Yonge didn’t have adequate paperwork with her.
She went home to get her birth certificate and was told she still couldn’t vote because the name on that document didn’t match her current name.
She went home once more to retrieve her marriage certificate to prove that the person she was at birth is the same person she is now even though the names differ. Third time in the voting line was a charm.
This is a foretaste of what it would be to live under the SAVE Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, a misnomer if ever there was one. I’ve written about this before (February 25), and New Hampshire is showing us what it will look like if it becomes reality.
There’s hope that the SAVE Act won’t pass when it reaches the Senate, but let’s call the whole idea what it is: Ridiculous. If voting in a closely-contested election hinges on bringing a small stack of papers to prove one’s eligibility, it’s easy to see how it will bottleneck the voting process. Poll workers will need extra time to confirm that a person’s identity checks out.
Who will agree to be an election official with the additional burden of checking every voter’s identity? If anything, the added headache is likely to confuse workers and to create opportunities for bad actors to use the situation to create voter fraud. If voter fraud were a massive problem, that would be one thing, but it’s not.
Republicans, who are behind the SAVE Act, have long championed being a party of small government, but this is a blatant example of officious bloat.
In New Hampshire, Brooke Yonge was a persistent voter. Not everyone will be, and that’s part of the plan.
What’s really behind that curtain
When Fox News’ Laura Ingraham went to the White House recently, the re-president steered her to some heavy blue curtains. The curtains in question were not covering a window but the Declaration of Independence.
At first, my heart sank, thinking that 45/47 had strong-armed the National Archives into giving him the original Declaration, but as he drew back the curtains, viewers could see that the ink was dark and legible. As I wrote on March 14, such is not the case with the original on public display.
In the way of any good narcissist, 45/47 proudly conflated fact with fiction: “Do you think Joe Biden would think of [displaying the Declaration]? Do you think he knows what it is?”
To complete the scene of super hubris, I couldn’t help but notice a poster board map, off to the side, of the southern U.S. that focused on the “Gulf of America.”
I once worked for a narcissist. I saw it day after day, the self-aggrandizing that everyone could see through, the gross incompetence, the crackpot ideas. But that person is your boss, and they have power, and you need your job.
And finally, you have to keep records
Robert “Bob” Leonard and Spencer Dirks have a podcast, “Iowa Revolution/Deep Midwest” on Substack. They covered the recent security breach/Yemen debacle and so have many, many other writers and reporters.
Imagine week-old pizza boxes stacked like dominoes with most of the pizza still inside. Imagine a slight breeze toppling the first box, and the whole stinking mess falling in quick succession.
A lot of the reporting didn’t focus on the first box, but Bob Leonard did. High-ranking government officials, by law, are expected to keep records of their communications. The Federal Records Act requires that such records be transferred to the National Archives.
Refusing to use the proper channels, by which such communications would be captured, was, of course, the plan. This became step one of the clusterf*ck that is being called Signalgate.
Thanks to Bob Leonard for pointing out what many others missed.