Politics

The worst voter suppression bill in history

Imagine having to show your birth certificate to law enforcement just to prove you're YOU.

Odin Halvorson

15 Feb 2026 — 4 min read

Your Vote Is Vital! | Published 1952 | Art credits from Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.

A new bill was just passed by the House via a majority of Republicans voting for it. This bill, the "SAVE America Act," would be—according to political experts—the most sweeping voter suppression bill ever passed by Congress due to the scale of its restrictions on voting. The core of this bill is a "Show Your Papers" requirement, meaning you would need a passport or a birth certificate just to register to vote.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a 'Show Your Papers' requirement is the stormtroopers from Star Wars. So let that sit with you for a moment. Imagine walking down the street and having a police officer order you to give them your birth certificate. That's not a future I want.

If you don't have your birth certificate or your passport on you, you get hauled away. That is the future that certain people in this country are attempting to engender. But really think about the math: half of all Americans don’t actually have passports. Furthermore, research from the Brennan Center for Justice shows that 21 million Americans don’t have easy access to citizenship documents at all.

For example, an estimated 69 million married women took their partner's name and have birth certificates that are different from their current legal last name. Under this bill, they could be completely cut out of the voting process. This legislation would also disenfranchise those who rely on student IDs, as well as anyone who relies on a tribal ID.

Ironically, it targets the very demographics the authors claim to represent; Republican women and people in rural areas are statistically more likely to be deeply affected by these barriers. Plus, think about it: how many people will shell out $100 or more for a passport that will take many weeks to arrive?

This is certainly another in a long line of centralization attempts by an extremist movement of self-centered American elites, but it goes deeper.

Another truly terrifying part of this bill is that it would require states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. Everything about you—your most private information—would suddenly be in the hands of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

This bill isn’t designed to do what it says it's doing; it is designed to continue a breakdown of the rather weak and shallow system of laws that America is teetering upon. We see this clearly when we look at the people currently leading the efforts to disenfranchise voters.

Take Kurt Olsen, who is a special government employee with the title of Director of Election Security and Integrity. This is a man who was literally sanctioned by a federal court because his claims about the election were proved to be utterly, completely, verifiably false.

Time and time again, these figures have searched for voter fraud, but all they have managed to do is sow fear and doubt. They are finding the cracks in a legal system that is simply not prepared to deal with this sort of pressure. We’re seeing the danger in how certain government officials are becoming involved in the takeover of the election process. Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence (a role where it's illegal to conduct domestic operations), was recently involved in an operation in Fulton County where 700 boxes of ballots and voting records were seized by the FBI.

I’ve seen people highlight this as a "red flag," but I think the flags have been up for a very long time—certainly for most of the last century. You can see this coming out in beliefs circulating some extremist groups that Nicolás Maduro—following his recent capture—will somehow "prove" Trump won in 2020. There are those who believe the administration would actually pardon Maduro in exchange for him stating that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election, despite both lack of evidence and a strong reason for the current administration to falsify everything it can.

What I’m really worried about is that I’m still seeing people acting as if the weaponization of law enforcement for political ends is something new. There are huge swaths of our population who have been dealing with the crushing weight of unequal and unfair practices for centuries.

Now, all of us are facing this for the first time. But none of this is exactly a surprise. The question isn't, "How do we get back to where we were?" The question is, "How do we go someplace new?"

By finally recognizing how fundamentally broken these systems are—and, in truth, how they have always been—we are finally freed from the illusion that they will save us. That realization is where our power actually begins. It allows us to turn our focus away from the distant, clashing gears of a hollow bureaucracy and back toward each other. It gives us the chance to make real, tangible change happen where it matters most: at the neighborhood level, one community at a time.

I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!

Support us in other ways: