Experts are calling it “the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress.” As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on a Trump-backed voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, millions of citizens who lack easy access to its required forms of documentation are now at risk of disenfranchisement. “Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote and pursuing this MAGA fever dream,” explains Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “It is the overarching goal of the Republican Party now to make it harder to vote.”
The groups most at risk of disenfranchisement include people who have changed their names after marriage, older voters who never received birth certificates, rural voters who could find it increasingly difficult to register to vote and trans people who have changed their names or gender markers on government documents. The GOP and MAGA movement’s goal, says Imara Jones, the founder and CEO of TransLash Media, “is to enshrine anti-trans discrimination in the law, because what they’re doing is using trans people as a road test in order to try to figure out how to disenfranchise and marginalize and strip citizenship away from millions of Americans who disagree with them.”