#uocava

Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket:

Republicans have launched their latest attack on the voting rights of U.S. citizens living abroad. A new bill introduced by three GOP House members, called the Protecting Our Voter Eligibility (PROVE) Act, would force nonmilitary overseas voters to prove they maintain a “current residence” in the United States with a verifiable mailing address. If they cannot, the bill declares, the individual shall not be treated as a resident of a state for purposes of voting in an election for federal office and instead would be “considered a resident of the District of Columbia” for that election. U.S. citizens living abroad would lose their ability to cast absentee ballots in the state they or their families call home. Instead, their only option would be a symbolic federal-only ballot in Washington, D.C., where there is no voting representation in Congress. And because D.C. has consistently and overwhelmingly voted for Democratic presidential candidates, this provision would, in effect, neutralize the votes of millions of U.S. citizens abroad.

A coalition of voting rights groups, including the U.S. Vote Foundation, which helps Americans abroad navigate voting, condemned the legislation as a radical disenfranchisement effort that would end long-standing protections under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). “This is voter suppression,” the coalition said in a joint statement. “It’s already challenging to vote from abroad. This bill would push participation toward zero.” Voting advocates say the legislation, though framed as a matter of “residency verification,” is nothing more than a partisan attack on the overseas electorate. It singles out civilians abroad — not active-duty military — in a way that would disproportionately silence civilian voices that now make up the majority of UOCAVA voters.

Jim Saksa and Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket:

The GOP’s sweeping new anti-voting bill cleared the U.S. House Wednesday, setting up a high-stakes battle in the Senate. The House voted 218-213 to pass the SAVE America Act, which experts have said could disenfranchise millions by requiring voters to show documentary proof of citizenship at registration and to provide photo ID when they cast ballots. All Republicans present voted in favor of the bill. While all but one Democrat voted against it — Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas. The proposal also directs election officials to conduct monthly voter roll purges to remove ineligible voters, which must utilize the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. 

The GOP’s push for the measure was driven by blatantly false claims.  “They feel they’ve got to allow illegals to participate in elections so they can continue to win,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Fox Wednesday. “We’ve got to stop that.”

Republicans have argued for voter ID broadly, pointing out that there isn’t much to prevent a noncitizen from casting a ballot in a federal election — besides the fact that it’s a felony, easily caught, and would lead to deportation all for the chance to cast one out of hundreds of thousands of votes.  There is, in fact, no evidence of noncitizens intentionally voting in significant numbers. Republican election officials have recently corroborated that with a series of lengthy reviews showing it’s a virtually nonexistent problem. Utah officials found just one noncitizen who was accidentally registered out of more than 2 million voters, while Idaho administrators identified 36 “likely” noncitizens. In 2024, Georgia uncovered only 24 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. 

The SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirements could potentially disenfranchise 21 million voters who lack ready access to a U.S. passport or a birth certificate to prove citizenship, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report.  The Center for American Progress estimates the measures would add voter hurdles for up to 100 million Americans. Republicans counted that states that have introduced tough voter ID laws in recent years haven’t seen a drop off in votes. But that could be because of a partisan boomerang, firing up Democrats incensed by the new policies more than it keeps apathetic voters at home. 

In recent weeks, GOP lawmakers have echoed President Donald Trump’s frequent demands for passing the bill, even as Trump has repeatedly said he wants to “take over” elections while  once again spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.  Despite the GOP’s sudden sense of SAVE Act urgency, passage seems unlikely in the Senate, where it’s unlikely to clear the 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster. 

[...] Even without the filibuster, it’s unclear whether Republicans have the votes in the Senate. Only 49 Republican Senators have come out in public support so far. And Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) posted her opposition on social media Tuesday, saying, “one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington, D.C., seldom work in places like Alaska.”  Alternatively, some Republicans want the SAVE America Act to hitch a ride on a must-pass bill, like the DHS appropriations bill for the current fiscal year or a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that would make already fraught bipartisan negotiations that much more difficult.  Ahead of the vote, the GOP adopted a “manager’s amendment” from House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) that clarified the effective date on the SAVE America Act would be the enactment date. 

His counterpart on House Administration, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) argued that if the law were enacted this year, it would be impossible for election officials to comply with it, given that primary elections have already begun in a number of states. After Democrats noted that the bill’s original documentary proof of citizenship requirements to cast a ballot would block voters from simply using their driver’s license, Republicans amended that element to allow any government-issued ID work. Registrants will still need to prove citizenship. In most states, that would require showing a U.S. passport or a driver’s license along with a birth certificate. (Only five states use “enhanced” identification cards that provide citizenship proof.) Under the proposal, voters submitting mail in ballots would need to send in a copy of their identification, except for the disabled and military service members stationed abroad and their spouses — other Americans living abroad, treated mostly the same as the military under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, would still need to send in ID copies. 

On Wednesday, the GOP-controlled House passed the voter disenfranchisement bill deceitfully known as the “SAVE America Act” 218-213 on almost all-party line vote, with Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) being the sole Democrat to vote yes.

The so-called SAVE America Act could have disastrous consequences for lots of Americans, especially married women. It would also make those utilizing VBM show identification.

This disaster of a bill is basically DOA in the Senate.

See Also:

Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

Following oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC) Monday, the fate of mail-in ballot grace periods remains unclear as the U.S.Supreme Court justices split on the case’s central question: When is a vote actually made — when a voter casts a ballot or when election officials receive it?  Republicans want the court to ban states from accepting mail ballots that arrive after election day, something that 14 states allow. Doing so could make it much harder for voters to use mail voting. The Court’s three liberals seemed ready to uphold Mississippi’s law allowing postal votes sent by Election Day to count if they arrive up to five days later. Meanwhile, three conservatives — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — sounded eager to scrap them. But the remaining three didn’t tip their hands as much.  Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh poked holes in some of the lawyerly logic they heard without revealing their sympathies, while Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing about the arguments themselves.  

“It is clear from today’s oral argument that the Court will be closely divided on this question, and the case could come out either way,” said Rick Hasen, an election expert and law professor at University of California Los Angeles. “Justices Alito and Gorsuch, and to a lesser extent Justice Thomas, pushed Mississippi’s [Solicitor General] with a variety of extreme hypotheticals not consistent with that state or any state’s law, to raise the specter of fraud with late arriving ballots.” Along with the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, the RNC challenged Mississippi’s grace period for late-arriving ballots in 2024, arguing that the state law is preempted by the Election Day Statutes — three laws Congress passed between 1845 and 1914 that set “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November… as the day for the election” for federal elections. 

The Supreme Court took up the case after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower decision dismissing the challenge and ruled that the wording of the federal statutes, as understood at the time, meant that ballots must be received by officials by Election Day, and thus grace periods for late arriving ballots are invalid. 

If the justices agree with the 5th Circuit, grace period laws for mail ballots in 13 other states (including Washington, D.C.) would be invalidated. That would put tens of millions of voters who rely on mail voting at risk of disenfranchisement. Nearly one in three Americans — about 31%, or roughly 48 million voters — cast their ballots by mail in the 2024 general election. Even with grace periods in place, more than 100,000 ballots were rejected for arriving too late that year.  Another 17 states have grace periods specifically for overseas and military voters, and whether those laws would necessarily also need to be struck down was an issue the Court grappled with Monday.

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart argued that Congress specified in the 1986 Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) that ballots mailed from Americans abroad should count so long as they arrive by the state’s deadline for receipt — a date explicitly distinct from Election Day. Since that law, many states adopted specific UOCAVA ballot deadlines and Congress hasn’t acted to make clear that those laws violate its intent. 

The Watson v. RNC case was heard at SCOTUS on Monday. The Watson case focuses on the validity of grace periods for vote-by-mail ballots, especially those that arrive after election day but postmarked beforehand.

13 states + DC have grace period laws for all VBM ballots, while another 17 have them for overseas and military ballots.

If the GOP-controlled Supreme Court rules in favor of the RNC in this case, there will be major disaster and would cause millions of those who use VBM to be disenfranchised from voting.

See Also:

NCRM: Supreme Court Signals ‘Likely’ Defeat Ahead for Trump: Report

HuffPost: Supreme Court Appears Ready To Make Voting Even Harder

GOP are doing the most to disenfranchise voters so much so that they want to invalidate votes from members of our military who cannot come home to vote?!? That is wild. Overseas voting is by no means a new thing at all.

The current law regarding this (Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) was installed under Reagan. Absentee voting has been used since back in the Civil War. There has been no evidence of fraud in overseas voting, but regardless GOP jokers wanna play up conspiracy to try to cheat. Why do we let them even stay in this country when they keep pullin this shit.

I was just browsing the draft minutes (pdf) for the SD State Board of Elections (BOE) meeting held on June 15, 2015. Since the BOE put its name on SB69 I decided to keep this board on my radar. I didn’t notice anything about ballot access or anything to do with SB 69. Most of the meeting seemed to revolve around HAVA funds (the Help America Vote Act of 2002). While that is a topic worthy of blog…