McCormick muddying misinformation on SAVE America Act

Should we require a passport or a birth certificate to purchase beer, effectively immediately? A driver’s license would no longer be sufficient.

Our super duper U.S. Senator (no, not super duper Fetterman, the other super duper one 🙄), Dave McCormick, seems to think you and I would be a-ok with that legislation. We already require identification to purchase beer, so does this even change anything? Not based on the way McCormick talks about the SAVE America Act.

Remember how I told you all about the SAVE America Act? How it’s “saving” us from a made-up problem that is a facet of the imagination and has absolutely no scientific evidence to back it up? We’re back at it today because this election law affects all of us.

First, let’s set the stage:

• Can elections be imperfect or get messy? Sure.
• Do we have systematic voter fraud? Nope.
• Does the actual language of the SAVE America Act fix the imperfections that actually exist? Nope.
• And is it almost certain to cause more harm than good? Yep!

💛 P.S. The real election corruption is gerrymandering and campaign finance. I will say this until I’m blue in the face or until it’s fixed. The voter fraud bologna is a distraction from the “legal fraud” they’re committing every day, orders of magnitude more egregious than any Joe or Juan trying to cast a ballot at their local polling station. 🫶🏻

🎤 Want to restore trust in our elections? Fix campaign financing and end gerrymandering. That’s my whole TED Talk.

Moving on…

Lights, camera, action

Our U.S. Senator, Dave McCormick, put on quite a performance, lying and misleading on the Senate floor. He’s drinking the “redirect the fraud conversation” Kool-Aid. I thought his mega millions would have bought him something fancier to drink, but apparently not. He’s probably drinking it with a Big Mac. 🍔

Don’t believe me that he’s fibbing? You can watch it for yourself on his own YouTube channel. You’ll need to know the facts of the situation to ascertain the accuracy, but you can see exactly what he said without partisan interpretation.

My first takeaway: Can one person in Washington, just friggin’ one, not be a liar?! Just one?! Is that too much to ask?! 🤬

Here’s the gist: McCormick starts by discussing how information around the SAVE America Act has been muddled and misleading, so he’s here to clear some things up. Thanks, Dave! 👍🏻 Then he lies and misleads with muddled information in the service of a proposed policy that itself is based on lies. No thanks, Dave. 👎🏻 You can’t make this stuff up.

He lies about the Chester County election mess (which was truly a mess) last fall. He uses it as fodder to promote the SAVE America Act, which would have had absolutely zero impact on the issues that arose in Chester County in the recent election. This article from the Philadelphia Inquirer (gift link) includes more details, so I’ll spare you here.

McCormick continues to make statements about election integrity and our election systems that are half-truths or designed to mislead. All so he can “clear up the muddled information” that has been stewing about this legislation…

💭 Do you ever wonder why we’re so concerned about AI hallucinations when our politicians seem to exist in fantasy lands and hallucinations? Do you think that if we fed them to the AI robots, they could become truths, like a hallucination of a hallucination becomes a truth? 🤔

Anywoo..

Let me give you some examples of McCormick’s nuggets:

Quote (on his own elections in PA): “These incredibly narrow races, each of which had electoral issues of its own, show just how important it is that our elections run smoothly, fairly, and that only legitimate votes are counted. And right now, we cannot, we must not, pretend that all elections in America meet this important standard.”

Fact Check: This is so misleading and clearly in service of promoting election fraud conspiracies that have been debunked time and again.

• There were no “electoral issues of its own” in either of his elections that would have had a meaningful outcome on the turnout. If there were, maybe he should not be in the Senate chambers? 🧐
• Elections don’t meet this important standard? By and large, they do. There is no systematic voter fraud, Dave. You know this. Is every vote perfectly counted? Probably not. Do we already have very safe and secure elections? We sure do! To equate minor issues with the need for transformative administrative burdens (implemented at the local level but mandated by the federal government) that are expensive, rushed, and likely to disenfranchise millions of voters is a willful disregard for good-faith analysis or genuine solutions to the real problems.

Quote: “In my home state of Pennsylvania, Chester County officials mistakenly omitted 70,000 third-party votes from the voter rolls. Registered voters were turned away at the polls. And an unknown number of unverified voters cast regular ballots.”

Fact Check: First of all, there are not “votes” on voter rolls. There are people who can then vote on ballots. This choice of words suggests that 70,000 votes were not counted.

📱 That line is gonna make for a great clip to feed the social media outrage machine. ✅

Second, voters were not turned away at all. Voters were mistakenly omitted from the voter rolls, and those voters were issued provisional ballots if they wanted them, which were later reviewed and reconciled with the voter rolls to ensure accurate vote counts. All the votes (provisional, unknown voters, whatever he wants to call them) are reconciled with voter rolls after election day to ensure accuracy.

💡 Fun fact: In close elections like the one between McCormick and Casey, ballots are counted and recounted for days (if not weeks) to make sure results are accurate.

Both parties have judges at the elections who oversee this process. McCormick’s version of this story is the exact “hyperbole and hysteria” language he says he’s trying to clarify.

Quote: “It should come as no surprise to us that, according to a recent Scripps/Ipsos poll, more than half of Americans, more than half, are concerned about noncitizens voting, and more than half fear electoral fraud.”

Fact Check: Well, no sh*t, Dave. Our President and the GOP have been spreading mis- and disinformation about this for a decade. The fear is manufactured on purpose. Notice what he doesn’t say. 👀 He doesn’t say there is electoral fraud or that non-citizens are actually voting, because he knows there is no meaningful fraud. He only says people think there is.

Read between the lines of his script. He’s telling us that this SAVE America Act responds not to widespread fraud, but to the fear of fraud, a fear that is manufactured and has been used as a tool to intentionally make people angry and lose trust in the very process that got him and our current GOP trifecta elected.

💭 Is it weird to anyone else that the party that currently holds the Executive branch and both chambers of the Legislative branch is spouting so much chatter about election fraud? Do they not think they won legitimately in 2024, an election held with a Democrat in the White House? If election fraud was rampant, don’t you think Sleepy Joe’s people would have used it to keep at least some sort of power?!

Quote: “The SAVE America Act also requires voters to show a government ID when casting a ballot. Now I’ve heard some claim this is too high a barrier. Let’s be serious. We ask Americans to show an ID to buy a beer, to board a plane, to donate blood, to apply for benefits, to even get married.”

Fact Check: You want to be serious? Let’s be serious, Dave. You forgot to mention that not just any government ID counts. A driver’s license, that government ID that lets you buy a beer, board a plane, donate blood, and apply for benefits, doesn’t let you vote in almost any state in the country, and certainly not in Pennsylvania.

This exact distinction that McCormick glosses over is one of the most significant concerns of people who do not support this legislation. He’s offering an analogy that he has to know is wrong (unless he’s woefully misinformed, in which case he certainly should not be the one “unmuddying the misinformation”).

Also, none of those things are constitutional rights, so if the barrier is a little higher for things that are nice but not constitutional rights, maybe that’s ok.

Friends, if he’s not muddying the facts by clearly implying that the same government ID that gets you all those things also allows you to vote, then I don’t know what muddying the facts is. This approach is ridiculously unserious!

Quote: “As we see here, a poll from the Pew Research Center, 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats polled all support voter ID.”

Fact Check: The SAVE America Act is not just a simple voter ID law. First (let’s repeat), a driver’s license doesn’t count, and less than half of Americans have a passport, so it’s not that simple. Couldn’t they use driver’s license information to tie back to government records and confirm voter eligibility?

Moreover, the bill includes other provisions, such as increased liability for volunteer election officials who make mistakes (which will almost certainly lead to issues at the polls when volunteer election workers can’t verify every ID with certainty that crosses the table). He never mentions this.

The bill is also designed to go into effect as soon as passed. To significantly change voter ID requirements with no window for preparation and proper implementation is completely irresponsible at best and intentionally harmful at worst. It’s definitely not simple, and any polling McCormick references surely doesn’t consider that nuance. He never mentions this either.

Quote: “…to consider the extraordinary stakes. We have the opportunity in this Congress to remove deep vulnerabilities in our elections and restore America’s trust in this core function of our republic.”

Fact Check: OMG. This is a lie! If you’re curious, I’m banging my head on a wall on the other side of this screen. 😩

We do not have “deep vulnerabilities” regarding voter fraud in our elections. This is a manufactured fear. The only reason we need to “restore trust” is because certain politicians and media pundits in this country manufactured a story that ineligible people are voting. They are not illegally voting in any meaningful way.

Do I sound like a broken record yet?

💸 You know where we have “deep vulnerabilities” regarding integrity in our elections?! Gerrymandering and campaign finance corruption, and mega millionaires like Dave are the beneficiaries of this corruption. You want to go after corruption in elections? Me too, Dave. Let’s reform campaign finance and end gerrymandering, regardless of political party.

The devil is in the details 😈

As I noted in my previous article, the issues the SAVE America Act appears to address seem fine on the surface. The devil is in the details. McCormick knows this.

It is disingenuous to suggest that “voter ID consensus” (and his cute little infographic behind him during his floor speech) equates to approval of the SAVE America Act. They are not the same. Let me repeat for those in the back. 📣 They are not the same.

🍻 Just to offer an equivalent analogy. Let’s say they did a poll (like the one Dave mentioned above) that asked, “Should we require people show ID to buy alcohol?” I bet a lot of people would be fine with that.

• What do you think poll respondents would say about a requirement that one show a passport or a birth certificate, not a driver’s license, to prove one’s eligibility? Do you think there would still be overwhelming support for that bill? Might a lot of people say, “Can’t a driver’s license just be good enough?”
• What if the government wanted to change the rule and make it effective immediately? Even people with a driver’s license who are old enough to drink alcohol couldn’t purchase it tomorrow unless they have a passport or carry an official copy of their birth certificate. Can you imagine what a mess that would be? Do you think so many people would still support it?

The devil is in the details, Dave. You know it.

Both of these scenarios are elements of this bill. I offer this analogy not to debate the details of which IDs to show at a bar or a beer distributor, but to highlight that the ‘simple voter ID’ bill is not as straightforward as Dave wants us to believe.

So what might be the right “solution”?

First of all, we don’t have a systematic voter fraud problem. We have a ‘solution’ seeking a problem that doesn’t exist.

But suppose we want more robust voter ID laws. Fine. Let’s assume that 80% of Americans agree with a simple voter ID law, as McCormick suggests. Here’s a “concept of a plan” to prevent voter fraud that’s more robust than Trump’s concept of a plan for healthcare in our country (low bar, I know, so I felt good about clearing it 💪🏻):

• Make obtaining a government ID for voting simple and free when you turn 18, similar to how we issue Social Security cards at birth.
• Ensure that REAL IDs are valid to vote. They’re good enough to buy alcohol, board a plane, and donate blood, so why aren’t they good enough to exercise a constitutional right like voting?
• Include in the legislation a delayed effective date sufficient to allow for reasonable and responsible implementation of the new law.

You can’t entirely change voter ID laws and make the legislation effective immediately, expecting that states will implement all necessary measures overnight. The lack of an implementation period in the bill might be the most obvious and egregious element of its disingenuousness. If we’re looking to protect election integrity, certainly we wouldn’t want to cause chaos and surprises around identity verification at the polls.

If government officials change voter ID laws knowing that they are incredibly difficult for millions of Americans to abide by and require compliance on a timeline that is prohibitively burdensome to do effectively, then their motives are not genuine.

Who is impacted by these changes?

Indirectly, everyone, because it effectively changes the voter pool, which could impact voting outcomes (and I’m not really sure which party it helps or hurts more).

Directly, this legislation impacts far more people than we might initially imagine (see my previous piece for more details). In that article, I asked how it applies to voters who are already registered. At the time, I wasn’t sure. Here’s an update:

If you move to a new county, change your name, change your voter registration, or (God forbid) if you are improperly removed from voter rolls in your state, you will need to re-register under these new requirements.

This legislation impacts a lot of people and makes becoming an eligible voter far more burdensome than necessary to ensure safe and secure elections in which only eligible voters vote (i.e., to keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for centuries, ya know).

It doesn’t have to be this way

Here’s what it boils down to for me. If the motives to increase election security were genuine, the legislation wouldn’t be written the way it is. It would look more like the bullet points I shared above. And if that was the case, we’d have far more consensus about the legislation.

But it’s not designed to responsibly maximize voter participation of eligible voters, which should be the goal in a democratic republic. It’s not designed to be simpler or more streamlined to limit opportunities for exploitation and promote democracy.

The legislation is designed to make voting a lot harder and centralize more authority at the federal level. That’s not good for everyday Americans or a robust republic. That’s only good for the handful of individuals already in power.

Don’t agree with me?

I’m ready to listen. Here are some key questions I’d ask someone with a different perspective.

• How do the benefits of this proposed regulation outweigh the costs? Even if there are benefits, they should easily outweigh the harm. As written, I don’t think that case.
• How is this the best option available to us? Unless it’s the best we can do, it shouldn’t be passed. The bill should be amended and improved before being put up for a vote. I think there are obvious opportunities for improvement.
• What do we make of the mountains of data reaffirming that very few ineligible voters even attempt to vote, and we already have secure elections?

Let’s discuss. 🗣️