- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to withhold his signature from all bills until Congress passes a GOP-led voting bill that implements voter restrictions ahead of the November midterms.
“I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION – GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY – ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The bill, called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, requires individuals to show citizenship documents to register to vote and strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. If passed, the legislation would also administer criminal penalties for election officials who register anyone lacking the required documents.
As my colleague Ari Berman wrote in February, the bill would potentially block tens of millions of Americans from voting. Nine percent of American citizens, or approximately 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents. The bill may impact millions of US citizens in other ways: tens of millions of women who took their partner’s last name, for example, may not have a birth certificate that matches their legal name could find it more difficult to register.
Cool. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not valid ID for the purposed “prove you’re a citizen” bill, so it’s mostly irrelevant to this discussion. It doesn’t even prove citizenship.
Being an ID and being proof of citizenship are two orthogonal ideas.
The SSN is the former, but not the latter.
The sentence “an ID to proof your citizenship” is misconstructed.
IDs and Proofs of something are both subclasses of “documents”. The correct phrase would be: “a document to prove citizenship”.
That document could (in principle) not identify you, but at the same time demonstrate that you are a citizen (for example, you could have a long cryptographic self-validated number that hashes to a “Yes”, or “Invalid”). But of course that’s not too practical.