The SAVE AMERICA ACT is a pain in the ass, but it’s not real.

Republicans do not want to pass this piece of shit bill.

President Donald Trump’s Republican Party would rather pick their voters than earn their votes, so they assembled onerous voting restrictions, ostensibly targeting Democrats, in their so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (“SAVE America”) Act. The president pronounced on Truth Social: “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed.” But this piece of shit bill cannot possibly be meant to pass, because it will fuck Republican voters.

If SAVE America is signed into law, if you are currently registered to vote, no you aren’t. The bill requires states to submit their whole voter rolls within 30 days of enactment to the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program—a USCIS database originally designed to check immigration status for benefit applicants, recently overhauled by the DOGE boys (pronounced “doggy boys”) into a bulk voter-verification tool—and take “affirmative steps, on an ongoing basis” to remove noncitizens. With no quiet period protecting voters from being incorrectly removed before an election, if the system flags you—correctly or not—you are off the rolls. Please never forget that you can be the voter who is purged. If this happens to you, which it can, through no fault of your own, to re-register, you will need to prove your citizenship.

It sounds very inconvenient to be at home, minding your own business, perhaps enjoying a beer or fine cannabis, and then, because you share a name and birthday with somebody else, suddenly you need to call and argue with the government over some bullshit. Wouldn’t let that shit happen to me, though. Your boy Hex checks his voter registration on a weekly basis. I keep my rights locked down. But Americans who are not on my level will not know if they are purged from the rolls.

Name-matching systems used to purge voter registrations introduce mostly false positives. The Washington Post’s investigation of the now-defunct Interstate Crosscheck program, which was created in 2005 by the Kansas Secretary of State’s office and expanded by now-Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, found that Crosscheck’s method of matching voter records using first and last name and date of birth “fails for practically all common American names,” and documented a 75 percent false positive rate in Virginia. Researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania found that following Crosscheck’s purge strategy would impede approximately 300 legitimate registrations for each double vote prevented. The headline: “This anti-voter-fraud program gets it wrong over 99 percent of the time.” Not good! Twelve states withdrew before Crosscheck’s court-ordered suspension in 2019.

The federal SAVE program is no more reliable. NPR reports that USCIS cannot verify some categories of native-born Americans, meaning legitimate citizens could be flagged for removal. Separately, election officials encountered instances where the system classified living voters as deceased. Since an enduring myth on the right is that an army of dead voters rise to cast ballots every few years, I suspect contesting rumors of your demise will not be made a straightforward process.

When Kansas implemented proof-of-citizenship requirements in 2013, more than 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12 percent of first-time registrants, were blocked. A federal court declared the law unconstitutional in 2018, finding that over 19 years, more than 99 percent of those who got fucked were U.S. citizens.

Newer tools promoted by conservative activists are no better. True the Vote, a Texas-based conservative activist group that challenged the eligibility of 364,000 Georgia voters ahead of the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, provides a cautionary example. A federal court concluded that their voter challenge list “utterly lacked reliability” and found its method “verges on recklessness.” Anyone serious about cleaning the voter rolls without harming eligible voters would find a better method, notify people, and ensure mass purges were conducted in an organized fashion. They do not.

After your franchise gets kicked to the curb like a dog, to re-register to vote, or even to update your registration after moving or getting married, you would have to present, in person, “documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as “a form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.”

“A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005” and “that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States” are separate clauses. The “requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005” are:

1. full legal name,

2. date of birth,

3. gender,

4. driver’s license or identification card number,

5. digital photograph,

6. address of principal residence,

7. signature,

8. security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication, and

9. a common machine-readable technology, like an RFID or barcode.

The SAVE America Act asks for an identification with those elements which, in addition, indicates the applicant is a U.S. citizen. A standard REAL ID does not show citizenship, but rather lawful presence; noncitizens are eligible for one. The version of REAL ID which includes this information is an “enhanced driver’s license,” which only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington issue.

If, like the majority of Americans, your driver’s license is insufficient, the law requires you to present a passport, birth certificate, naturalization certificate, “final adoption decree showing the applicant’s name and that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States,” or a “Consular Report of Birth Abroad.”

Even military IDs are only acceptable when accompanied by a service record showing a U.S. birthplace, so our brave men and women in uniform will need to make sure they have those on hand. DD Form 214 can be requested through the National Archives’ eVetRecs system or through VA.gov, but the waiting period for that can be as long as “within 10 working days of receipt [but] [m]any factors may alter that time including work load [and] current volume of requests.” One imagines that by creating a new scenario in which they are needed would therefore increase the volume of requests.

I have been involved in a weeklong feud on social media with a retired angler who is convinced all he will need to do is flash his license on November 3, 2026. Poor guy loves Mr. Trump more than his own family, and does not even know his hero would disenfranchise him. It is a mortal sin his party will not even give him accurate instructions on how to vote for them.

Republicans must know that the form of ID required by the SAVE America Act is unavailable in most states. If any GOP congressperson or senator is unaware, they are too negligent to be trusted with a belt or shoelaces. If they are aware but still imply that a simple ID will suffice, their constituents will notice when they are turned away—how can they stand to face them?

Online and mail registration would be a happy memory. The law requires “applicant present[] documentary proof of United States citizenship in person to the office of the appropriate election official,” so you would have to drag yourself to a county election office some weekday during pain-in-the-ass banker’s hours.

In large metro areas, this can be a dedicated facility. DC has a building on Half Street; Montgomery County, Maryland has a standalone office in Gaithersburg; Fairfax County, Virginia has one on Government Center Parkway. But in most of America, the election office is a room inside the county courthouse or community building, operated by a few clerks. Or less—a Reed College study found that small counties with fewer than 5,000 voters typically have one full-time employee handling elections, and medium-sized counties average two.

Some examples:

• Highland County, Virginia, population 2,232, runs its elections out of a trailer at 97 Highland Center Drive in Monterey. Open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., weekdays.

• Pickett County, Tennessee, population 5,100, runs elections out of Room 2 of the Community Center at 105 South Main Street. Open 8:00 to 4:00, weekdays.

• Hancock County, Tennessee, population 6,662, lists a P.O. Box as its election office mailing address.

• Cameron County, Pennsylvania, population 4,547, the least populous county in the Commonwealth, runs elections out of the courthouse at 20 East 5th Street in Emporium. Open 8:30 to 4:30, weekdays.

Currently, only about 6 percent of Americans register to vote in person at an election office. The other 94 percent use online registration, mail-in registration, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or voter registration drives. How equipped are these little operations to handle vastly increased demand in the next eight months or less? Are all of this country’s vital records offices prepared to handle a three-to-four-month surge in documentation requests? How about the DMVs or the State Department? Of course not.

The Center for American Progress analyzed the 30 largest U.S. counties by area and found that voters living farthest from their county seat would have to drive, on average, a 260-mile round trip to reach their election office. Mohave County, Arizona is a representative horror: the 2,500 residents of Colorado City face an eight-hour round trip drive to the office in Kingman.

Senator Lisa Murkowski opposes the SAVE America Act, noting 20 percent of Alaska’s population is not on the road system. For those Alaskans, registering to vote requires chartering a flight. That would suck—sorry, your name got struck by mistake! Book a plane some weekday to get that taken care of.

Republicans pray the filibuster holds and the bill dies, because they fear punishment if they make their low-propensity voters, who hate paperwork, miserable—which SAVE America assuredly will. Meanwhile, I suspect nerdy, front-of-class Democrats will have an easier time assembling the required paperwork into their Lisa Frank Trapper-Keepers than Republicans.

All my woke feminist friends smirk: “Consider the demographic math: 84 percent of women who marry change their surnames, meaning roughly 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name. Of those two populations—married women without passports, and unmarried women with passports—which is more likely to vote Democrat?”

In seven reliably Republican states, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, fewer than one in three citizens hold a valid passport. The Brennan Center estimates 21 million voting-age Americans lack ready access to any proof-of-citizenship document.

It happened to me, too. It is easy to lose track of your birth certificate if the last time you saw it was in a shoebox under your mom’s bed, but she gave it to you for something, and neither of you is sure where it landed after that.

A further 3.8 million adult citizens have no citizenship documentation whatsoever, no birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. Perhaps they were born at home without hospital records—I find it shocking that MAHA conservatives and tradfolk and homesteaders would not consider the midwives and doulas. Personal records can also be lost due to displacement or disaster, and sometimes documents are lost during a messy adoption. None of these are especially extraordinary circumstances.

Only 43 percent of Americans hold a valid passport, and getting one requires appearing in person, paying more than $100, and waiting six to twelve weeks. And renewing it is a real hassle too, and an easy expense to skip when the president has blown up the world economy with an ill-planned Iran war, gas is averaging $3.80 a gallon, and you have no plans to jet-set.

Your boy Hex can tell from personal experience how irritating figuring out your paperwork is if you do not already have it done. My family has been on this continent since the Revolution, but after I finally found my birth certificate in my own shoebox, it was destroyed by a hot coffee spill. So, I had trouble getting my REAL ID.

Replacing that ruined birth certificate was excruciatingl. I contacted my state department of vital records, but they turned out not to process those replacements. It was subcontracted to VitalChek, who runs their vital records racket in all fifty states. Their backlog was almost a month, and I waited patiently. But it never arrived—lost in the mail! Per a bullshit policy of VitalChek’s, I was required to wait another month, see if it showed up randomly, before they would send a replacement. The process took approximately two and a half months and a lot of time scaling unhelpful phone trees.

Republican talking points on the ubiquity of ID in modern life can only be meant to describe a parallel universe. Apparently, nobody on that side of the aisle goes to grocery stores, since they let Mr. Trump insist constantly that you need to show ID to check out at a Food Lion. He has repeated this claim since at least 2018, when his then-press secretary, now-Arkansas Governor Sarah Hucklebuck Sanders tried to “sanewash” his rambling by claiming he was talking about age verification for beer. Never one to be made to sound reasonable, Mr. Trump then clarified no, he definitely meant to say he thought Americans were carded buying cereal. The liquor store barely asks to see my ID, though that may be because I carry myself like a noir hero. I did recently need to show my driver’s license before IHOP let me pick up food after an overnight beat, and they even demanded I sign for it, too, which was odd.

Mr. Trump told the Republican Governors Association on February 20, 2025, that blue states would “totally disappear off that map.” How ominous! At the House Republican retreat at Trump National Doral Miami, on March 9, 2026, the president (who was also profiting his party’s forced patronage of his business) told his congressional servants the bill would “guarantee the midterms” and that they would “win every election for a long time.” On ex-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast on February 2, 2026, Mr. Trump warned that without action, “Republicans will never win another election.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, or “MAGA Mike,” as they call him in the club, said on Fox Business in February 2026: “They’ve got to cheat, frankly. That’s it. They’ve got to allow illegals to participate in elections so that they can continue to win.” Nasty, racist bullshit. He is unworthy of the Speaker’s gavel. I was told by an e-sports competitor that the “Fighting Game Community” has a special phrase for that kind of bitching: “No Johns.”

Mr. Trump claims any result in which Republicans lose is fraudulent, so to avoid contradicting him, these lickspittles will never “take their L,” at least so long as he is breathing. If the SAVE America Act passed and the GOP still lost, they would invent a new fraud to cry about. Anything for the “party of personal responsibility” except take responsibility for their bad rhetoric; costly, reckless adventurism; abdicated leadership; and failed economic and social policies.

Right now, all augurs predict the GOP will experience historic losses in November. They could even see Senate seats in Texas and Alaska slip away. They need some excuse, since admitting Mr. Trump’s governance is unpopular, he has the temperament of a bitch, and his tariffs fucked the economy, would call into question why that whole party supports this bullshit without question.

Mr. Trump, that Mandarin Mussolini, that dotard, that orange clown, pushes this haphazard nonsense into the air to enfever fear, uncertainty, and doubt—because inflaming his goons the same way he did when they stormed the Capitol arouses him, and he hopes for violence and extralegal actions to ward off his ever being held accountable for anything in his fucking life.

Changing elections requires retraining the more than 600,000 poll workers and 20,000 full-time officials across the country, which is expensive, time-consuming, unfunded, and certain to have hiccups. But the bill takes effect immediately upon enactment. With no implementation runway ahead of the November midterms, any “wrinkles” will cost Americans their franchise. Anything at that scale rushed at that speed will be as wrinkled and malformed as the president’s—anyway, and red state governors will pretend Mr. Trump’s legislation is not inconvenient, so they will not conspicuously stymie bad effects on their constituents.

Republicans want you to have an ID to vote, but also for getting an ID to be frustrating, annoying, and difficult:

• Alabama: Passed a strict voter ID law in 2011. The following year, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency closed 31 Driver License examining offices statewide. Al.com columnist John Archibald tallied the results: every county in which Black residents made up more than 75 percent of registered voters lost its Driver License examining office. Eight of Alabama’s ten majority-Black counties saw closures. Twenty-nine of the state’s 67 counties were left entirely without one. The Brennan Center estimated 250,000 to 500,000 registered Alabama residents lacked the ID needed to vote. The state eventually agreed to reopen some offices one day per month, which is still pretty damn inconvenient.

• Texas: After passing SB 14, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found in 2016 that the law had a discriminatory effect on Black and Hispanic voters. In some rural Texas counties, the nearest DMV office was more than a hundred miles away.

• North Carolina: In 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the state’s voter ID law, finding that the legislature had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision” by reducing early voting days, eliminating same-day registration, and narrowing acceptable ID forms. N.C. State Conf. of the NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204 (4th Cir. 2016).

This all sounds terrible. I prefer to lick an envelope and be done.

The voter ID debate has gone on for longer than some of its proponents have been sucking air, so Republicans know by now that it disproportionately affects poor people and urban citizens, particularly elderly non-drivers. And married women have certainly told them that their names do not match their birth certificate. But we already know the Party of Lincoln does not care about those groups, because they have had time to find acceptable solutions to these troubles and will not.

But what about MAGA Joe who lost his wallet? In some states, replacing your real ID is not a same-day operation. You must wait at least two to four weeks, longer with a backlog. Is “sucks to be you” the Republican Party’s official response to that?

If Republicans wanted to pass voter ID without bad effects, they would require an ID voters can even possess, expedite the process to get that ID, expand the state’s capacity to issue it, and implement mechanisms to identify and help residents having trouble.

Republicans falsely describe the impact of this legislation and imply it will present no friction. If their intention were not to remove eligible voters who cannot jump through every hoop, are they too stupid to understand that their process is bottlenecked in a dozen ways? In that case, they should resign immediately and seek remedial education.

To presume Republicans merely wish to improve the voting process requires ignoring their announcements that with their legislation in play, they will win. “If we change the rules, we will win every time!” Sounds sketchy as fuck.

Republicans have alleged that Democrats rely on illegitimate votes, but the Associated Press examined six states Trump contested in 2020 and found fewer than 475 alleged instances of fraud out of more than 25 million ballots cast—a number that would not have changed any result. Investigations and audits after that election, many conducted by Republicans, found no evidence of widespread fraud. I have never heard a Republican apologize for lying about that election, or admit they said things that were not so. Sorry, Mario, the fraud must be in another castle. If they cannot admit past errors, accuracy is not what they aim for.

If only voters capable of solving the paperwork puzzle of re-registering in a short window were allowed to vote, the Republican Party would purge its own voters from the rolls. They would be fucked. Their goal, then, must not be to do that. They just want something to bitch about: “We would have won, if not for the meddling ghosts and aliens! If only we had passed this, we would not have been humiliated in the midterms!”

Because I am gracious, I say let them have that. It makes them look crazy. But instead of arguing over whether voter fraud exists—negligible amounts do—I hope more opponents of this legislation try walking themselves through the process and describing it.