There’s a lot of focus on the SAVE Act, which is basically a Jim Crow dream list of everything you can do to stop people of color from voting. The SAVE Act won’t pass, because Trump needs 60 votes in the Senate, and they are not going to change that rule because that kills the filibuster.
Senator John Thune, who’s the majority leader for the Republicans, has indicated he will not change the filibuster rule to move the SAVE Act because he knows that there’s a damn good chance that the GOP’s going to be thrown out on its keister in November. And then, if he removes the filibuster, the Republicans are going to get hammered (depending on who the Democratic leader is).
But, here’s the thing, you don’t have to pass the SAVE Act for it to have tremendous power. Because, what most people have not noticed is that not only did Trump propose a SAVE Act, he put the provisions of the SAVE Act into an Executive Order. So, it doesn’t matter what Congress does. It’s up to the courts to see how much of this will survive — and look at our courts.
One of the key provisions of both Trump’s Executive Order and the SAVE Act is federal access to state voter roll information. Why do they want this? The overall aim is to purge voters. Now understand, we purge about 20 million people from the voter rolls every other year, on off years. And about 4 million of those people who’ve been purged were purged wrongly.
It took years to get rid of Interstate Crosscheck, a purge program I exposed in my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Crosscheck crudely matched names, and purged people, claiming they were trying to vote in more than one state. Flawed by design, Crosscheck disproportionately ensnared voters of color with common names like Jose Garcia and James Brown, who tend to vote blue. After we exposed it, and the ACLU successfully challenged it in the courts, citing our work, we thought Crosscheck was dead. But here it is, back in another form.
And they’re expanding the vigilante challenge system I exposed in my film Vigilantes Inc., where in around half of states, new laws mean anyone can challenge the rights of voters, and challenge them en masse. In the film, we interviewed one woman, Pamela Reardon, who personally challenged the eligibility of 32,379 voters in Georgia.
The organization that provided Reardon with her challenge list — and has created vigilante challenge lists containing the names of millions of voters — is called True the Vote. This organization partnered with a guy called Gregg Phillips for a movie, 2000 Mules, which justified all of these new vote purging programs by making false claims that the 2020 election was stolen by thousands of “mules” illegally dropping fraudulent ballots into dropboxes.
Right now Phillips’ day job is working as the Associate Administrator of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. And recently, he was talking in an interview about how he was teleported from his home to a Waffle House. I kid you not!
This is the guy who is in charge of federal emergency management, who helped come up with lists to challenge the rights of millions of voters, and he claims he’s being teleported to a Waffle House?!? This is how our elections are being run. This is how our government’s being run.
So, forget the idea that Trump’s gonna call off the elections, because he is not gonna bother. He doesn’t have to — if you fix the elections. Remember they have elections in Russia. Under Saddam Hussein, they had elections in Iraq. The Communist Party has elections too. It’s not a question of elections. It’s a question of whether you have a fair election.
Watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Vigilantes Inc. for FREE!
