Steve Bannon still has the ear of the US president. But he has his eyes on Australian politics, and has praise for the PM and advice for Pauline Hanson.

Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.

The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.

These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.

Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.

Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.

Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.

  • mkwt@lemmy.world
    8·
    19 hours ago

    Here’s the plan for how the SAVE Act is intended to work:

    1. SAVE Act requires voter ID, but it actually requires a photo ID that says “US citizen” on the ID.
    2. For most people, the only identity documents that do that are passport books and passport cards.
    3. Bad news: By and large, Americans don’t have passports. Passport adoption is really low compared to Europe.
    4. Suddenly a bunch of Americans have to apply for passports to vote. Many will have trouble gathering the required documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses (for name changes). Many won’t get it done in time.
    5. What a disaster! So many people can’t vote!
    6. But wait! SAVE Act comes in with a solution! States can be exempted from the ID bullshit.
    7. But there’s a catch! To get the exemption, your state must have been turning over its voter rolls to the feds, quarterly, since July, 2025.
    8. If your state, like every, uh, blue state, hasn’t been doing that… Well, I guess it just sucks to suck. There’s no way to become compliant now, and the SAVE Act hasn’t even been enacted yet.
    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
      1·
      36 minutes ago

      Suddenly a bunch of Americans have to apply for passports to vote. Many will have trouble gathering the required documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses (for name changes). Many won’t get it done in time.

      In addition, the agency that processes the passport requests can use voter data to selectively deny applications.

      Oh, you’re a democrat voter in a battleground state… Sorry it took us 6 weeks, but it looks like you forgot to write the date in MM/DD/YYY format so we’re going to need you to to re-apply.

      Red voter? Crayons are fine, sir.