New Hampshire finds out what it is to be SAVEd

Brooke Yonge, from Derry, New Hampshire recently went to vote in a local election and was prevented from doing so. New Hampshire now requires proof of citizenship to vote, and Yonge didn’t have adequate paperwork with her.

She went home to get her birth certificate and was told she still couldn’t vote because the name on that document didn’t match her current name.

She went home once more to retrieve her marriage certificate to prove that the person she was at birth is the same person she is now even though the names differ. Third time in the voting line was a charm.

This is a foretaste of what it would be to live under the SAVE Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, a misnomer if ever there was one. I’ve written about this before (February 28), and New Hampshire is showing us what it will look like if it becomes reality.

There’s hope that the SAVE Act won’t pass when it reaches the Senate, but let’s call the whole idea what it is: Ridiculous. If a small stack of papers is required in a closely-contested federal election, it’s easy to see that it will bottleneck the voting process as poll workers will need extra time to confirm that a person’s identity checks out.

Who will want to be an election official with this additional burden of checking everyone’s identity? If anything, the added burden is likely to confuse workers and create opportunities for bad actors to use the situation to create voter fraud. If voter fraud were a massive problem, that would be one thing, but it’s not.

Republicans, who are behind the SAVE Act, have long championed being a party of small government, but this is a blatant example of officious bloat.

In New Hampshire, Brooke Yonge was a persistent voter. Not everyone will be, and that’s part of the plan.

What’s really behind that curtain

When Fox News’ Laura Ingraham went to the White House recently, the re-president steered her to some heavy blue curtains. The curtains in question were not covering a window but the Declaration of Independence.

At first, my heart sank, thinking that 45/47 had strong-armed the National Archives into giving him the original Declaration, but as he drew back the curtains, viewers could see that the ink was dark and legible. As I wrote on March 7, such is not the case with the original on public display.

In the way of any good narcissist, 45/47 proudly conflated fact with fiction: “Do you think Joe Biden would think of [displaying the Declaration]? Do you think he knows what it is?”

To complete the scene of super hubris, I couldn’t help but notice a poster board map, off to the side, of the southern U.S. that focused on the “Gulf of America.”

This is the sign of malignant narcissism, to flaunt meaningless gestures and require obsequious adulation from your underlings to satisfy your stupid whims. Then, when confronted with serious issues, like the recent Yemen bombing debacle, feign ignorance of it all.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.