I don’t think so…
My passport expired not long ago and I didn’t have a birth certificate available to get a Real ID from the Dept of Motor Vehicles. Unless they had extended the law requiring some form of Real ID during the pandemic I wouldn’t have been able to travel until I obtained one of those things. During the pandemic the wait for a new passport was months as was getting a copy of my birth certificate which I finally got after waiting almost a year. The new passport came through in record time a few months ago.
I only bring this up to illustrate that obtaining those documents is a major hassle even if you have expired documents that already prove your citizenship. It’s no doubt eased a lot since the pandemic but even then you have to go through hoops, it costs money and unless you really need it you might just say the hell with it.
Republicans know this, which is why they’re doing this:
Only months before November’s elections, the Republican National Committee has launched a new legal attack on the rules that govern federal elections. Supported by 24 states, the RNC is seeking, on an emergency basis, a Supreme Court ruling that the United States Congress lacks the constitutional authority to regulate presidential elections—congressional elections, yes, but not elections held to select presidents. The petitioners’ immediate goal is to allow the state of Arizona to impose a “proof of citizenship” requirement as a condition of a person’s right to vote for president.
If they are to succeed, the Court will have to suddenly, with mere weeks left before people start voting, abandon or explain away a decision it rendered in 2013—that Congress has the power to establish rules for voter registration in presidential elections. But even if the suit fails, it risks achieving some success in sowing doubt about the integrity of elections, highlighting claims of illegal voting by immigrants, and laying a foundation for post-election allegations of fraud and related legal challenges. (I have advised the national Democratic Party on this suit and have been further monitoring it as part of nonpartisan work to support election administrators in their preparation for the fall elections.)
The RNC target in this suit is a federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), enacted in 1993 to establish uniform, simplified, and nondiscriminatory rules for the registration of voters in federal elections. NVRA requires states to provide registration opportunities at their motor-vehicle departments and public-assistance agencies, and directed the adoption of procedures to keep voter rolls accurate and current. The law also mandated a federal voter-registration form that states must “accept and use.” The form requires an attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury and no further documentation.
But in 2022, Arizona passed a law requiring its voters to submit, along with the federal form, documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC), such as a passport or a birth certificate. Under that law, Arizonans who register to vote with this form but do not provide DPOC would be barred from voting at all for president, and from voting by mail in any other election in the state. The state has never enforced the law, for one reason: In 2013, the Supreme Court had held that the NVRA preempted an earlier version of this requirement—constitutional-law-speak for not permitting the state to add its own DPOC mandate to the attestation called for by the federal form. This meant that the state could impose its own requirement only for state elections. Ever since then, only those Arizona voters who do not use the federal form to register have had to supply DPOC.
There is no reason to believe that the right wing majority on the court will be averse to overturning the 2013 decision or the 1993 decision for that matter. They’ve shown that they have zero regard for precedent and are especially willing to overturn voting rights. So I wouldn’t hold out too much hope in their “integrity” on this one even if it doesn’t make it to the high court this cycle.
The right has been trying to suppress the vote forever. They simply do not believe that the franchise should be easy for Americans to exercise and particularly don’t want to allow people they believe will vote their own economic interest to have the vote. But here’s the thing — the coalition is changing. The people who are most likely to have the kind of documents Arizona requires are educated urbanites and suburbanites and they aren’t voting Republican anymore. I would expect that many working class and rural white people won’t have them any more than the Black and Latino voters they are targeting with these laws.
Are they really sure this is going to help them?
Donald Trump didn’t invent the bogus voter fraud theme he just exploited it more effectively than anyone before him. One of the reasons non-MAGA cultist Republicans are so willing to believe his Big Lie is because Republican politicians have been lying about this stuff for decades. Anti-democracy isn’t a Trump thing and it won’t go away when he does.
