Washington attack on women’s voting rights mirrors Kansas mistake of 14 years ago | Opinion
I went to a meeting of the League of Women Voters earlier this week.
I came away thinking that if things go the way I expect they’re going, they might need to change their name to the “League of Women,” because the voting part is about to get really dicey.
Pending before Congress is a nasty little bill called the “SAVE” Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility. It’s another Republican effort to require “proof of citizenship” documents to vote, on the false premise that it prevents undocumented immigrants from voting.
It passed the House last year — and has been reintroduced this year — despite the fact that every legitimate study ever done, including by the right-wing Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, has shown that voting by unauthorized immigrants is negligible.
The reason is obvious. If you’re here without legal residency, the last thing you want to do is interact with state and federal authorities. There are mountains of evidence so tall that even most Republicans who push the lie of illegal immigrant voting don’t actually believe it anymore — if they ever did in the first place.
Make no mistake: The SAVE Act’s real target is the ongoing participation in politics of America’s women, because polls show they’re more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than men are.
Anything else is a cynical lie, brought to you by QAnon shamans and the power-over-principle wing of the Republican Party.
Kansas disaster
In Kansas, we’ve been down this road already and it was an abject disaster, which disenfranchised tens of thousands of legitimate American citizens without ever finding a single vote cast by an undocumented immigrant.
The SAVE act is nothing but a warmed-over federal version of the proof-of-citizenship provisions of the Kansas SAFE Act of 2011 — a law the Legislature passed at the urging of Kansas’ director of voter suppression, then-Secretary of State and now Attorney General Kris Kobach.
The SAFE Act required that voters provide documental proof of their citizenship to register to vote.
I can already hear the specious and disingenuous argument that’s always raised when this topic comes up: “You need ID to cash a check, so why don’t you to vote?” So let’s deal with that right off.
We are not talking about having to show your driver’s license or other commonly available photo ID at the polls.
The SAFE Act and the SAVE Act “proof of citizenship” requirement is much more stringent and requires specific documents that practically nobody carries on their person and that many people don’t have easy access to — a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate.
Here’s how it targets women specifically: Eight out of 10 women who marry change their names. So for an estimated 69 million women, there’s a mismatch between the name on their birth certificate and their current ID.
Unlike men, they need to bring birth certificates, marriage certificates and sometimes divorce decrees to show how they got from the last name they were born with to the one they have now.
It doesn’t mean they can’t register. But it makes it a lot more difficult and women have to track down way more “proof” of their citizenship than men do.
After Kansas passed the SAFE Act, more than 30,000 legitimate citizen voters found their registrations suspended because they couldn’t untangle the red tape.
And we are a very small state. Implemented across the country, the SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions.
The Kansas SAFE Act was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver because it conflicted with federal law — which allows voters to meet their citizenship requirement with a legal affidavit sworn under penalty of perjury.
If the SAVE Act passes, Kansas and every other state would lose that shield of protection of our voting rights.
The Kansas Legislature also gave Kobach the authority to investigate and prosecute crimes of voting fraud. But you can’t get a full accounting of his prosecutions and outcomes (I’ve tried).
What is fairly clear is that all his bluster resulted in fewer than 10 prosecutions for illegal voting, including finding zero undocumented immigrants voting. The available record shows there was only one immigrant prosecuted, who was here legally.
The rest of Kobach’s illegal voters were mainly rich people with property in two states, which they apparently thought entitled them to vote in two states.
Take care of yourself
Fighting smart has taken on new importance, as each new day brings new horror stories out of Washington.
President Donald Trump, his multibillionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and their DOGE apparatchiks are tightening their authoritarian control by spreading chaos as only they can — shutting down government services and agencies, firing and/or threatening legitimate public employees, canceling approved contracts and siding with bloody-handed dictators over America’s longtime democratic allies.
The main focus of the League of Women Voters’ meeting this week was how women can be active in this political climate without burning themselves out.
Among the tips offered in the meeting by League membership co-chairwoman Andrea Anglin:
▪ Curate your news sources to make sure you’re getting, and acting on, factual information.
▪ Seek out positive news to balance the horrifying news out of the White House.
▪ Connect with others, so you don’t feel like you’re fighting alone.
▪ Mute phone notifications and limit social media exposure to a few times a day.
I totally understand a normal person’s need for that kind of self-care in this atmosphere.
But the biggest problem the defenders of American democracy face today is that their opponents aren’t normal people, and they don’t need self-care. They’re fanatics and sociopaths who enjoy hurting people — as much and as many as possible.
DOGE is dominated by the kind of men whose belief in their own superiority runs so deep that they lock legitimate public servants out of their offices without notice, then bring in sleep pods so they can get wired on Red Bull and serve up dysfunction and destruction 24/7.
Musk actually brags about this: “DOGE is working 120 hour a week. Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”
Against this backdrop, the best piece of advice I heard at the League meeting was this: Focus your energy by picking one or two issues you care about the most and concentrate on those, because you’ll get overwhelmed if you try to fight everything they’re doing all at once.
In the case of the League of Women Voters, I’d suggest the best thing they can do right now would be to put all their energy into fighting the SAVE Act — because if America’s women lose that battle, it’s only a matter of time until they lose everything else.
This story was originally published February 27, 2025 at 8:03 AM with the headline "Washington attack on women’s voting rights mirrors Kansas mistake of 14 years ago | Opinion."
