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Beware the Save Act
If you are anything like me, then you are currently pickling in your own cortisol. As the US grows increasingly violent, increasingly cruel, every day brings a legion of new horrors. So I’m very sorry to say that I’m here to ruin your weekend by giving you yet another thing to worry about. That thing is called the Save Act and, if the Trump administration gets its way, it could have an oversized impact on the November midterms, particularly when it comes to minorities and married women being able to vote.
A good rule of thumb when looking at a Republican-drafted bill or campaign is that its name is directly the opposite of whatever it is meant to achieve. If there is something about ‘protecting women’ in the title, for example, then it’s probably actually about controlling women or bullying transgender people. The same is true of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which would change the way US citizens register to vote. The purpose of the bill doesn’t seem to be to safeguard democracy but to help destroy it through stealth disenfranchisement.
If it became law, the Save Act would require Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register or re-register to vote. Per one Brennan Center Study, more that 21 million American citizens, many of whom are engaged voters, do not have easy access to these documents. While just over 8% of self-identified white American citizens don’t have these documents readily available, the Brennan Center found the number is nearly 11% among Americans of color.
Women who changed their name when they got married may also face a logistical nightmare: reports show that as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name don’t have a birth certificate that matches their legal name. “The legislation does not mention the potential option for these Americans to present change-of-name documentation or a marriage certificate in combination with a birth certificate to prove their citizenship,” the liberal thinktank the Center for American Progress noted.
To make things even more complicated for everyone, the Save Act would also disrupt online voter registration. Americans would have to appear in person, with their original documents, simply to update their voter registration information.
A proof-of-citizenship law similar to the Save Act has been tried before, by the way, including between 2013 and 2017 in Kansas. And guess what? It was an expensive disaster that prevented more than 30,000 Kansans from voting. It’s well-established that these sorts of laws disproportionately harm low-income, disabled, married women, and marginalized voters. Why are the Republicans so keen on making it harder for these groups to vote? I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you.
Of course the Save Act isn’t being presented as a way for Republicans to sneakily sway the midterms in their favour as confidence in Trump dips. Rather, it’s being presented as a way to stop fraudulent voting. “[W]e all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” house speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference about the act when it was first introduced in May 2024. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.” I think we all know, intuitively, that it’s not easily provable because that claim is nonsense. And, in fact, we don’t need to rely on intuition, we have data! One Brennan Center for Justice study that looked at the 2016 election found just 0.0001% of votes (30 incidents) across 42 jurisdictions, with a total of 23.5m votes, were suspected to include non-citizens voting. Non-citizens voting is already illegal and not a problem that needs to be solved with new legislation.
So just how likely is it that the Save Act, or some version of it, will get passed before the midterms? Unclear, but looking increasingly likely by the day, unfortunately. The Save Act passed in the House in 2025 but then stalled in the Senate. Now, however, there’s a lot of new momentum to try and get it over the line. In a speech to House Republicans at the beginning of the year, Trump urged lawmakers to pass a national voter ID law ahead of the 2026 midterm election and his cronies have ramped up their efforts to draft what House majority leader Steve Scalise recently called an “even stronger” version of the Save Act.
And, of course, if it’s not the Save Act it’ll be something else. The Trump administration has been busy chipping away at the mechanisms that keep election systems free and fair. They can’t (yet) get away with cancelling the November midterms but they can destroy faith in the system through baseless claims of voter fraud. They can redraw congressional maps and try to impose onerous voting requirements.
This, of course, is how democracy dies. Not in darkness, but in daily headlines. Not with a bang, but with a relentless barrage of paperwork. Not with one power-hungry man breaking the law, but with his legion of acolytes weaponizing it.
Man accused of attacking Ilhan Omar charged with assault
Anthony Kazmierczak faces federal charges after interrupting the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar at a town hall and spraying her with what is now determined to have been apple cider vinegar. After she was relentlessly criticized by the president, some sort of attack on Omar felt inevitable and it’s lucky this one wasn’t worse. “[E]very time the president of the United States has chosen to use hateful rhetoric to talk about me and the community that I represent, my death threats skyrocket,” Omar said on Wednesday.
Older women ‘disappear’ from BBC presenting roles
An independent review of the British broadcaster found nearly four times as many male presenters over 60 as female in the BBC’s content division and nearly twice as many older men than women in BBC News. This seems to be caused by perceptions that men gain “gravitas and wisdom” as they age. Surely a gander at the president of the US, who gets more manic by the minute, should quickly dispel this idea.
The traumatizing impact of the Taliban’s informal birth control ban
While there isn’t an official ban on contraceptives, Afghanistan’s reproductive health system has been decimated over the past few years. “After the Taliban came, the contraceptives started reducing,” one doctor told the Guardian. “Within months, they were gone.” The result is more lethal pregnancies and miscarriages that can’t be treated.
Shirley Raines, Beauty 2 the Streetz founder, dies at 58
The Los Angeles-based activist, known as “Ms Shirley” to her more than 5 million TikTok followers, brought beauty treatments and other services to vulnerable people on Skid Row.
The war on journalists in Gaza continues
Despite a supposed ‘ceasefire’, international journalists are still not freely allowed in Gaza and Palestinian journalists continue to be killed by Israel. Western journalists should be in uproar about this assault on press freedom. Instead the likes of CBS are simply parroting Israel’s talking points.
“From the heart, brains, and boobs of Sydney Sweeney”…
… comes a new lingerie label called Syrn. And, as you can tell from the marketing copy, it is not subtle at all. The promo for Sweeney’s latest venture is also in-your-face: the actor, sometimes known as “Maga Barbie”, decorated the Hollywood sign with bras. Whether she got permission to do this is unclear and there’s some chatter that she could get in trouble for trespassing. Only kidding! As the Trump administration keeps demonstrating, it’s OK for certain people (particularly those with the right “jeans”) to break the rules. Laws are for poors.
The week in pawtriarchy
Grrrr-ipping news from San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood where a live TV report on the capture of a young mountain lion was interrupted by a coyote strolling past the camera. The attention hound was swiftly captured and later released back in the wild. And the mountain lion? Also relocated. As the San Franciso Standard joked, it will now be released “somewhere with fewer billionaires”. Pacific Heights clearly doesn’t have room for that much Mane Character Energy.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
