Democrats need to let ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ go
Today’s voting rights fight deserves seriousness, not slogans
Today, Senate Republicans are expected to begin debate on legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (or SAVE) America Act, which its proponents are laughably billing as a vital election security measure.
The president has loudly and repeatedly vowed to not sign any additional legislation until Congress passes this bill.
The SAVE America Act seems innocuous enough. It would require voters to provide “documentary proof” of citizenship when registering to vote. (I should state here that it is already very illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections — which is something the bill’s authors consistently elide). The bill specifies that the only acceptable forms of documentary proof include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a government-issued ID that shows a person’s place of birth as the United States.
A core problem here is that, while most voters likely have access to some subset of those documents, not all do: over half of registered voters do not currently possess an active passport with their updated legal name. What’s more, local elections offices often lack the capability to verify the accuracy or authenticity of some documents. Their mandate is to access updated voter rolls and facilitate voting on Election Day, not perform citizenship verification.
A more onerous provision of the bill would compel states to verify with the federal government that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote by providing access to their voter registration rolls. This should be a non-starter for any state elections official, regardless of party, as it violates the constitutional principle establishing states as the primary authority over election administration.
States handing over their voter rolls to the feds is in direct contravention of decentralized control of our elections. It is a step we should all seek to avoid.
In short, it is bad legislation that is trying to solve a problem that does not exist: American elections are already secure and the microscopic (as in, fewer than 100) known instances of non-citizens casting a ballot over the past 30 years have been promptly detected and adjudicated.
Democrats should be confident in opposing the legislation on the merits alone, but that doesn’t seem to go far enough for some elected officials. Recently, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the platform I still refer to as Twitter to decry the GOP’s efforts:
To be clear, efforts like the SAVE America Act would introduce new hurdles to registering to vote. Voting rights groups have been highlighting the potential for millions of Americans to be disenfranchised because of the bill’s provisions. There are also bipartisan concerns about the impact this could have on an already beleaguered elections workforce.
It’s a very bad bill. But it is no ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’
No ‘Jim Crow 2.0’
As a black son of the south, I am intimately familiar with Jim Crow’s many insidious forms and lasting vestiges. It’s what makes the use of the phrase particularly galling to me in this moment. Jim Crow was a careful and intentional project to reinforce white supremacy across every sector of public life in the former Confederacy. It inflicted terror on black Americans for generations. My own mother was born in the literal first years when Jim Crow’s reach had been forcibly ended by Congressional mandate.
When you apply that slogan to what’s happening now, you insult the gravity of the past and undermine the serious policy debate of the present. The Civil Rights Movement was successful because it finally began to convey the promise of multiracial democracy to citizens who had long been denied it. Our country has made discernible, though incomplete, strides across all of the spheres Jim Crow once infected. Our nation has evolved, and so too must the language we use to describe the challenges that remain.
The policy fights of today are not the same as our forebears faced. We can underscore their seriousness without resorting to hyperbole that misstates what the actual shortcomings of a given policy are. On the SAVE America Act, for example, requiring a passport as a form of documentary proof of citizenship would likely privilege swaths of the electorate that are younger, high earning, college educated, and concentrated in the northeast and west coast. Ask yourself which political faction would stand to benefit from that arrangement. (Hint: I don’t think Jim Crow would be too happy).
Broadly casting all Republican election integrity measures as racist tools also blinds Democrats from embracing any litany of good voting proposals that sometimes emanate from the political right. For instance, a bill from the SAVE America Act cinematic universe—the Make Elections Great Again Act—requires all absentee ballots to be delivered by Election Day and allows them to be processed (but not tabulated) immediately upon receipt. This would modernize our elections by virtually guaranteeing the ability to project winners in most races across the country on election night.
Recall that in 2020, one of the lynchpins for Trump’s “stop the steal” lie was Pennsylvania’s slow absentee processing method that initially showed him with a lead on election night. That lead evaporated as mail-in ballots were counted—which Pennsylvania law only allows to commence once polls close. And how many times must we wait weeks for California to process its mail-in ballots to officially determine the control of the House of Representatives? Is it not reasonable to expect that all the voting and the counting should be done by the day we have set aside to pick our leaders?
Looking ahead
Our voting system can surely do better than the status quo while maintaining fairness and guaranteeing access to the ballot. There are certain flaws in how we administer elections,, flaws which the right often exploits so they can falsely cry fraud where there is none. Liberals would do well to embrace some elements of the measures Republicans propose as remedies, not dismiss them out of hand with a lazy slogan.
I don’t want to absolve the Republicans of their anti ‘small-d’ democratic impulses. They are real, and we should stay vigilant. But that cannot be the sum total of our vision on voting rights and fortifying our democracy.
With the conservative Supreme Court majority seemingly likely to further erode the Voting Rights Act, we should be plotting the next phase of the evolution of this experiment with multiracial democracy — not lamenting the low moment in which we find ourselves.
We face real obstacles in strengthening our democracy against efforts that would ultimately disenfranchise voters. But for our side to ultimately prevail, useless rallying cries like “Jim Crow 2.0” have GOT to go.
"This should be a non-starter for any state elections official, regardless of party, as it violates the constitutional principle establishing states as the primary authority over election administration."
Says right there in the constitution:
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Finally some sense about the SAVE bill. It's overkill and much too onerous for the citizenry. This might have been a possibility during the REAL ID rollout, but it's too late for that now.
I keep hearing about all of this election fraud. Can we get some kind of bipartisan investigation done to put this to bed, once and for all?