Mastodawn

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The SAVE act targets people who've changed their name *for any reason*. Ya know who's done that?

- Married women
- Trans & nonbinary folx
- Immigrants

You know which US citizens that leaves?

Mostly white men.

The SAVE act isn't trying to save anything other than patriarchy and fascism.

@amydiehl https://mstdn.social/@amydiehl/116008903793655443

Amy Diehl, Ph.D. (@[email protected])

SAVE Act would require birth cert or passport that matches voters legal name. 69M women may have a legal name that doesn’t match their birth cert. An estimated 21M would be turned away at polls. This act is an attempt to disenfranchise women voters. https://www.thepersistent.com/this-bill-in-the-senate-could-disenfranchise-millions-of-women-voters/

Mastodon 🐘

DFX4509B (Joshua Mason)Feb 4

Goodbye Universal Suffrage.

さよなら皆さん Feb 4

@alice BINGO! SAVE must be stopped - it's another item on a long list aimed at ending liberal democracy.

True story.

In all but about five states, not even a REAL ID will let you vote. The requirements to get on a federal installation are lower than voting under the SAVE Act.

LukefromDC Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl And in 2017 a Washington Post poll found 75% of white male registered voters surveyed were registerd GOP and one third of them agreed with at least one statement out of a list of white nationalist statements.

It is a tossup whether ICE's brutal terrorism will change enough white make minds to reverse this. Note that historically only white men, in fact only landowning white men were permitted to vote in the US.

If they take away everyone else's votes and white voters hand the GOP a win this November, we can treat the entire election results as rigged and illegitimate. Any nonwhite votes cast and counted (even if only by exit polls) should then be extrapolated to estimate what votes would have been cast by those who were prevented from voting and used to challenge the outcome not just in courts but in the streets.

Such a brazenly stolen election will stir up a huge hornet's nest and may give us what we need to finish this conflict and throw down everything Trump and Project 2025 stand for. It will that is if we actively defend the election itself from Trump's interference understanding we may be defeated in that battle but the cost of that win for Trump may be decisive. If we convince everyone this is inevitable before November and its not a shock to the general public anymore, that hornet's nest will be a faint buzzing in the distance only.

There is also the chance the GOP makes this a white men only election by a decisive margin (say by tossing out 10+% of other voters) and the GOP gets stomped anyway. If THAT happens we are in an excellent position no matter how Trump responds.

@amydiehl @alice A a white man who took his non-American wife's name, I'd also be disenfranchised as my name change was cosmetic. I'm also sure supporters of this crap bill think I did a beta move by doing so

Patch You Up Feb 4

@sleepytako @amydiehl @alice My wife and I both kept our names when we married (in academics it's a pita to prove authorship of something after a name change). We get confused looks regularly when people realize we have different last names. Most people are still living in the old world.
It also confuses people that our son has her last name. We did that mostly because her last name is far more interesting/unique than mine.

Shannon Clark Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl @shansterable also (and while it shouldn’t matter this might sway some folks) Catholic nuns, monks and priests - up to and including the Pope who often take new names when they take their vows.

(My aunt has been a Catholic nun for over 60 years - we in the family know her under one name. But her public name under which she has written books, led centers for the environment at universities and been a longtime lobbyist to Congress is her name she took when she took her vows)

Claus Cramon Houmann Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl I think that those are exactly what its meant to 'save'. Evil again again.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl That also means the end to witness protection schemes.

How do you deal with an asylum seeker without papers? There is no birth certificate or passport to be found particularly in countries where civil society and the system of keeping of public records has broken down.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl People with new identities courtesy of witness protection get birth certificates for their new names.

Very few countries allow asylum-seekers to vote in national elections at all, regardless of how well-documented they are. If one becomes a US citizen, they get a certificate of naturalization, which is explicitly listed as acceptable proof of citizenship in the bill.

This proposed law is awful, but those two specific concerns aren’t affected either way.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl Thanks for the clarification.

What I would be concerned with is that such new laws are often drafted in haste in the ideological fervour of the moment

Those that end up drafting such laws will either deliberately or just due to a complete lack of imagination and empathy create a whole host of additional situations where peoples' identity can become a problem for them.

Even for those who are already citizens of the US*.

* insert country of your choice.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl As regards asylum seekers, my thought was if they do get granted permission to stay, then how will the new laws affect them.

Not just when they are newly arrived but also should the seek US citizenship at a later date.

If you arrive without any papers then how can you prove an identity that matches your birth certificate and hence claim your right to vote as a US citizen.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl > If you arrive without any papers then how can you prove an identity that matches your birth certificate and hence claim your right to vote as a US citizen.

That’s already a problem today, regardless of this proposed law. It sucks because, yes, the people most in need of asylum protections are often the least able to produce documentation. The barrier is the naturalization process, though, and this proposed law doesn’t affect that.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have had a collection of experiences, related to the different way that the UK and most other European countries treat identity.

Some countries base your permission to stay on your birth certificate and others on the passport you present.

In my case the names on the two are not the same.

The UK demands that if you have two passports then the names on both must be identical.

But UK passports do not support accented characters found in other European alphabets.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Yeah, the EU+UK situation is separately awful, since there’s no super-state authority you can directly be a citizen of (i.e, you can’t be a citizen of the EU directly, only of a state within it). Instead, there’s a mess of individual states all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. Most allow non-resident citizens to vote. Some allow non-citizen residents to vote. Ridiculous, inconsistent documentation standards like the passport situation you mentioned. All based on imaginary lines on the ground.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl Before Brexit happened if there had been an "EU passport" I would have applied for it immediately.

Identity is a pain in the neck. In the UK you can choose the name that appears on your passport.

In the Netherlands and Norway people are all registered in the People Registers. So you get the name that you are officially registered with when you apply for a passport.

The UK has a perculiar way of dealing with legal identity and has no central register for all people.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have no idea how this is managed in the US though.

Is your legal identity registered at federal or state level?

Or not at all?

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Births are registered at the local level (county/parrish, below US state), but they confer citizenship at the federal level. The US federal government is the entity which issues passports and social security numbers (basically our national ID number for financial purposes). Driver licenses and most other non-passport IDs are managed by the US states. Depending on who is asking for identity and why, we may need a birth/naturalization certificate, passport, social security number, driver license/state ID number, or a paper utility bill (sometimes needed to prove residency for state and local elections).

US states run their own elections, so rules for voting are all over the place (which is why the USA doesn’t meet the minimum standards for election monitoring by the Carter Center).

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl "SAVE Act would require birth cert or passport that matches voters legal name. "

So where and how is a person's "legal name" recorded?

In the UK there is the concept of "known as" which means that you can end up being called something other than is on your passport.

You can change the name on your passport without changing your legal name by deed poll to match it.

Not advisable as I found out trying to help a relative but I believe even now it is still possible.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl So is the "legal name" in this case the name that the person has used to register themselves as voter?

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl “Legal name” in this case is talking about the voter registration. We register to vote at the US state level. The registration involves name and address (to determine which county, city, town, etc. elections we vote in). We get a registration card (mine arrived two days ago) which lists all of the information about which districts we vote in, and we’re added to the voter rolls available to polling places.

Since US states run their own elections, they all have different rules about how to determine who someone is so they can use their ballot. Many have been adding photo ID requirements, and the name on the photo ID has to match the name on the voter roll. This proposed law is saying beyond just a photo ID, you also have to prove you’re a citizen using documentation with a name which matches the photo ID and the voter registration.

A passport is both a photo ID and proof of citizenship, so it fills both requirements. Everybody else would need to bring a birth/naturalization certificate. When people change their names, they often don’t go down to the county registrar’s office to get a new copy of their birth certificate. They usually just keep the original one and a copy of the name change documentation, as that’s enough for everything else we use a birth certificate for.

It’s ultimately a poll tax, just like the photo ID requirement. Blatantly unconstitutional, but we have an illegitimate Supreme Court.

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl We had a poll tax in the UK at the end of 1980s/early 1990s. Implicit in the law was that it would force people to remove themselves from the electoral roll in order to avoid paying the tax.

The only good that came out of it was that the opposition to the tax forced the resignation of Prime Minister Thatcher - an odious pro-Pinochet, neo-liberal, monetarist, Reaganite.

So maybe this tale gives some hope for you folks in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax_(Great_Britain)

Poll tax (Great Britain) - Wikipedia

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 4

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl More recently another UK scandal related to legal identity and nationality in the form of the "Windrush scandal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

Windrush scandal - Wikipedia

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl A lot of the US is heavily racist. After slavery was limited to prisoners, states used a variety of techniques to prevent Black people from voting. Poll taxes and poll tests (literacy tests, civics tests with biased answers) were favorites. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 explicitly made poll taxes illegal for federal elections. The Supreme Court of the United States also declared poll taxes unconstitutional in 1966.

Incidentally, the literacy tests are where the terms “grandfather clause” and “grandfathered in” come from. Many states allowed a man to skip the literacy test and vote if his father or grandfather had voted before 1867, a date selected to exclude most Black men.

@bob_zim @the_wub @alice @amydiehl The fact that literacy test almost certainly fucked over the blind too was probably considered a bonus.

Space Hobo Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl The "married women" thing may surprise some people who haven't worked out all the arithmetic on this yet. After all, aren't the right wing always obsessed with traditions such as women taking on their husband's family name?

The whole point is that they'd streamline the edits to the birth certificate along with marriage certificates, and then make the reverse change extremely difficult so as to interfere with divorce proceedings.

Swift (will be at EMF)Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl @spacehobo the idea that getting married would edit your birth certificate is so fucking weird

ChloChloaca Feb 4

@alice @amydiehl

Clarence Thomas also made mention at some point last year that states should revert trans people's birth certificates to their deadnames/genders. So then it would be completely impossible nationwide for anyone to have a matching birth certificate.

Hi it's Kylie 🫀Feb 4

@CordiallyChloe @alice @amydiehl yikes

@alice @amydiehl

Just like the Founding Fathers intended

@amydiehl @alice To be fair, immigrants that became citizens are very likely to have valid passports because of trips to visit friends and relatives

@alice @amydiehl

You know there is a saying in these here United States “where the women are nice and the men are ICE.” But many of the men and women in ICE job lines are brown.

@alice @amydiehl women will have to stop changing their names when they get married

@alice @amydiehl + divorced women; dv survivors
#women #marriage #divorce #domesticviolence

Maddad ☑️Feb 5

@alice @amydiehl

I think it's no coincidence either. #tRump isn't smart enough to forward think things and have any sort of plan. It's the ones working behind the scenes that are the power behind this.
They are setting up the midterms so he will win, and they can carry on with their rape of america.

@alice @amydiehl
Two groups of people I'd like to suggest also targeted but I haven't seen mentioned in this thread:
- divorced women;
- abuse survivors seeking to escape their abuser;