Substack Live With Stacey Abrams
Saturday morning at 11 a.m. ET
“But you need identification to do everything—to get on a plane, to cash a check. I don’t get what the big deal is about needing ID to vote.”
As the Trump administration continues to push the SAVE Act, with its enhanced ID requirement, it’s important for us to understand the answer to this question, because it’s a big deal. You may have even wondered about this question yourself. Measures like the SAVE Act are outright voter suppression, a deliberate effort to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. But the answer as to why isn’t always obvious. We need to parse the details.
In my class last week, one of my students asked this question. By the time the class was done discussing it, the students realized that what might not be a hardship for people in their position would keep other citizens, who are just as entitled to vote as they are, from doing so. That’s the key point here, and it’s important to understand the nuances, so you can share the answers with others.
I asked Stacey Abrams to join me so we could address this question fully. I hope you’ll join us. With the SAVE Act gaining votes among Republican senators, this may well be the most important issue out there. Any questions you want to make sure we address? Leave us a note in the chat.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
The SAVE Act isn’t about election security. It’s about making voting prohibitively difficult for populations who don’t vote Republican. Elderly people without driver’s licenses, students whose addresses don’t match their ID, married women whose documents still show maiden names, rural voters hours from DMV offices, people who can’t afford to take a day off work to navigate bureaucracy.
These aren’t edge cases, they’re millions of eligible citizens whose votes threaten minority rule. Voter ID sounds reasonable until you examine who actually gets disenfranchised, and then it’s perfectly clear why Republicans are pushing it while simultaneously gutting the administrative capacity to help people obtain those IDs.
This is voter suppression with a legislative veneer, and Stacey Abrams has been fighting it longer and smarter than almost anyone.
Listen to her.
—Johan
This is disgraceful and discriminatory to women who vote.