Do not look away

Mr. Y, there is no need for the SAVE and MEGA acts because voter fraud is negligible. What they will do is reduce the number of eligible voters at the polls. I'm sitting at my computer and have easy access to transportation, but many don't, and they depend on voting by mail.

I'm not pointing a finger at Trump for dropping fascism on America overnight. He did not cause it, and it will not end with him. Fascism rose in America since the early 20th century. Witness where the robber barons put their money after monopolies were broken up. Wall Street, including the Bush family, financed German industrialists. Then there was the attempted fascist coup d'état of 1933 when Wall Street financiers recruited Major General Smedley Butler to replace Roosevelt. Butler was loyal to the Constitution and exposed the plotters. We fought fascism in World War Two, including my great-uncle, only to put them back in power in the name of anti-communism. There's the China Lobby, the Dulles's, the use of narcotics to finance covert operations, Japanese and German post-war flight capital, the Bormann Organization, the national security establishment and Nazi link to the JFK assassination, Indonesia, Vietnam, Latin America, the Republican Committee's Ethnic Outreach groups--created under Nixon to counter "the Jewish vote" by importing "ex-" Nazi leaders to round up votes in ethnic communities. There's Iran-Contra, the US-instigated maidan coup in Ukraine, which resulted in Nazi control of Ukraine, etc. etc. You get the idea. It's all documented at spitfirelist.com, which has an excellent search feature. It's not all about Trump, and we should all be scared.

In-person voter fraud is VERY rare. When weighed against the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters for minor paperwork errors, lost address validation postcards, etc., I think that the goal of the GOP's "voter fraud" drive is to make it more difficult for groups that are primarily Democratic to vote, not to combat meaningful fraud. And remember, you need ID to register to vote, and voting fraud is a felony. For Democratic staffers and volunteers, it's much less effort (and it's legal) to get a forgetful Democrat to vote than it is to enlist someone in a felony to get a single vote!

For example, when the GOP in Pennsylvania a few years ago asserted voter fraud as the reason for a draconian ID law, and it landed in the courts, they were unable to produce a single example of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. When the Court asked for evidence, "The state [of PA] signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there 'have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.'"

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have birth certificates or similar documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

"A federal court in Texas found that 608,470 registered voters don’t have the forms of identification that the state now requires for voting.... Many of the residents struggling to obtain a valid photo ID are elderly and poor and were born in homes rather than hospitals. As a result, birth certificates were often lost or names were misspelled in official city records."

Also, "In deep-red Florida, a GOP elections supervisor checked 176,000 voters and found just 15 questionable cases. Three were simple clerical errors. Two were already proven citizens. “We didn’t get a mass onslaught of people,” she said flatly. “We have clean voter rolls.”

Louisiana? 403 noncitizens out of 3 million voters — just 0.01% — with 83 votes cast. The Republican secretary of state admitted the quiet part out loud: “This is not a systemic problem.”

In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections audited the 2016 election and found that 4,769,640 votes were cast in November and that ONE would probably have been avoided with a voter ID law.

Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt tracked US elections from 2000 to 2014 in search of "specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls." He found only 31 allegations out of more than 1 billion votes cast.