Right-Wing Plot To Prevent Women From Voting Advances

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When she was working as an election official in Arizona years ago, Tammy Patrick encountered voters who supported what was then the state’s new “proof of citizenship” law for voter registration — only to realize that they weren’t able to vote. Via Huffington Post:

“They’d say, ‘I voted for that!’” she recalled of the voters, many of whom were “snowbirds, older people, who didn’t have the wherewithal to get [the correct documents] because the documents didn’t exist anymore.”

“It was heart-wrenching,” Patrick said.

At the time, Arizona was the only state in the nation with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement for voters, and thousands of people have since lost out on the right to vote in state elections. Kansas, which later also tried its own citizenship requirement for voter registration, saw similar results.

I wonder how many people know that Republicans and their tech donors want to keep women from voting — because women lean stubbornly liberal? In Peter Theil’s essay, “The Education of A Libertarian,” he wrote:

…The great task facing the world was “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” For Thiel, that doesn’t just mean bad government — it means any government, even the democratic kind. He blamed what he viewed as the sorry state of things on two culprits — “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries” and “the extension of the franchise to women.” The growing ranks of poor and female voters, he lamented, had made it virtually impossible for libertarians to prevail at the ballot box. The solution? Reject the “unthinking demos” and create a world “not bounded by historical nation-states.”

Thiel has put his billions behind that philosophy, and his mentees include JD Vance, who he introduced to Trump at Mar-A-Lago. He worked closely with Musk at Paypal, and several of his network are now working at the White House.

Remember when you’d read about libertarians, roll your eyes and say, “Thank God no one ever votes for them”? They’re running the White House now. It’s why DOGE is leaving chaos in its wake.

But two efforts, one each from the White House and congressional Republicans, have made the prospect of a national proof of citizenship requirement a real possibility.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” In addition to ordering a slew of changes to voting machine standards and information-sharing arrangements between the federal and state governments, the order ― which is not a law ― instructs the Election Assistance Commission to change its national mail voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship.

In Congress, the so-called SAVE Act would similarly mandate proof of citizenship documents. The bill passed the House last year and is scheduled for a vote in the House this week, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).