It’s Really the Keep Americans FROM Voting Act

by admin | March 26, 2026 6:03 pm

I cast my first ballot here in Gregg County at the age of 18 in November 1973. It was an off-year election. I do not recall what was on that ballot, but research indicates there were five proposed amendments to the much-amended Texas Constitution. There does not appear to have been any local races decided that November. I voted simply because I could.

In 1972, I was too young to vote, meaning I missed out on casting a ballot in the presidential election. Not that it would have made a difference, since Richard Nixon overwhelmingly defeated Sen. George McGovern in Texas and nearly everywhere else. The South Dakota Democrat won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. I deeply admired McGovern for his positions and his basic human decency. In Gregg County, then as now heavily Republican, a local labor leader formed a group called Democrats for McGovern to counter the much more popular Democrats for Nixon. A clear sign of the futility of this effort was that I was chosen as chair of Democrats for McGovern, despite being just 17 and too young to vote. The labor guy rented us a small office in the old KFRO radio station building, which was then next door to the downtown post office. The building is long gone. My fellow left-wing high school buddies and I had a great time running that office, even though we knew it was a lost cause.

Over the past fifty-plus years, I have rarely missed voting in an election. Sure, I have skipped a few municipal races or amendment votes, but not many. In late May, I will go to the polls to cast my votes in the Democratic runoff for the races that weren’t decided in the primary. I doubt there will be much of a line.

Throughout most of my journalism career, Republicans have tried to restrict voting with unproven claims of voting fraud. I have written countless opinion pieces and editorials pointing out that this is a solution in search of a problem. The latest effort, President Orange Skin’s SAVE America Act, is easily the most dangerous attempt to disenfranchise voters attempted in my lifetime. More on that in a bit.

First, let’s discuss voting fraud, which is largely a myth. A researcher for Brookings[1] analyzed data collected by the conservative

Heritage Foundation, now notorious for creating Project 2025, which has become the blueprint for the depredations of the current administration. The percentage of reported fraud cases from 1986 to 2024 has never approached 1% in any state. For example, Heritage examined 30 years of election data in Pennsylvania. Out of 100 million ballots, only 39 cases of fraud were reported. That’s 0.0000388%. That’s thirty-eight ten-millionths of one percent. (Thanks, Chat GPT. No way I could have articulated that.)

No election outcome in the time span and states examined by Heritage was altered by ballot fraud. Not one.

The latest bogeyman, pushed for the past decade by POS, is that undocumented immigrants are going to the polls and swaying elections for Democrats. Yeah, right. ICE goons are pulling people out of their vehicles, nabbing them when they try to follow the rules and attend asylum hearings, speeding into Home Depot parking lots to grab anyone with brown skin. Under that type of oppression, does anyone believe an undocumented immigrant is going to risk being arrested, detained, and ultimately deported for voting?

The main part of the SAVE America Act would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register, like a birth certificate or passport. There are several issues with this proposal. First, people would need to register or re-register in person, which would likely cause an immediate drop in voter registration. Second, as a 2023 YouGov survey shows, only 43% of American adults have a passport. That leaves potential voters needing a birth certificate to prove citizenship. Do you know where your birth certificate is? I suspect many of us don’t. Even more egregious, if a married woman changes her last name to her husband’s, it no longer matches the name on her birth certificate. A 2023 Pew Research Center study[2] found 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages took their husband’s last name, meaning their IDs no longer match the surname on their birth certificates.

Another aspect of this bill, which should more accurately be called the Keep Americans From Voting Act, would severely limit mail voting, which POS claims he opposes — even as he votes by mail! According to FactCheck.org[3], a nonpartisan, nonprofit project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center, POS has voted by mail at least four times since 2016. He voted by mail this month in a special state legislative election while staying in Mar a Lago! (A Democrat flipped that race, which makes the score in flipping races from one party to another approximately: Dems 24, GOP zip.)

POS apparently does not want anyone else to have the opportunity to vote by mail. Surprise!

At this writing, it looks unlikely the Keep Americans From Voting Act is going to pass. POS is going to pitch a fit, threaten not to sign any legislation, bluster and hell, maybe go bomb another country to distract from the 1,000-pound gorilla — full release of the Epstein files.

Finally, POS, the overwhelming choice for Christian evangelicals in the last three elections, posted this after the death of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and special prosecutor during the first term of POS. Mueller served as a Marine in Vietnam and earned a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart, while POS stayed home with “bone spurs.” POS posted, “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” That came a few months after POS celebrated the murders of film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, blaming their tragic deaths — apparently at the hands of their son — on “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I am baffled that anyone who considers themselves a Christian could support such a cruel, despicable human being as POS.

It is clear who is deranged here, who is acting like a dangerous, caged creature feeling the walls closing in on him, and that is POS. That is why he and his minions keep falsely claiming undocumented immigrants are helping Democrats steal elections, even as they know it is patently false. I pray that there is a reckoning this November. I expect there will be.

Source URL: https://garyborders.com/pages/its-really-the-keep-americans-from-voting-act/

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