2028 Election

Results from the Kansas experiment with SAVE Act rules -- 99.9% of the voter registrations blocked were US citizens

The Kansas Prophecy: We Already Ran This Experiment and the SAVE Act in Kansas Was a Disaster

When Kansas tried its early version of the SAVE Act, a whopping 31,089 eligible American citizens were blocked from voting. Meanwhile only 39 noncitizens were “caught”… over 19 years. And many of them turned out to be administrative errors.

That’s the final score from Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship experiment — the same core policy the SAVE America Act would impose on all 50 states. Republicans are selling it as “election security.” Kansas already has the receipts on what it actually is.

Been There, Done That

In 2011, Kansas passed a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. It was the brainchild of then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who styled himself as America’s foremost crusader against the specter of rampant illegal voting. The law went into effect in 2013 and immediately went sideways.

DMV clerks weren’t allowed to request the new documents — or even tell people the requirement existed. Voter registration drives cratered: one effort at Washburn University collected 400 applications but managed to fully register roughly 75 people. A process that used to take five minutes stretched to an hour. Steven Fish, a warehouse worker born on a now-closed Air Force base in Illinois, couldn’t produce an acceptable birth certificate. Multiple plaintiffs in the lawsuit that followed were military veterans. All were U.S. citizens. None were the noncitizen bogeymen the law was supposed to stop.

The federal courts annihilated it. A 118-page district court ruling struck it down as unconstitutional. The 10th Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. The judge sanctioned Kobach personally and ordered him to take remedial legal education — a humiliation nearly without precedent for a sitting state official. Kansas paid $1.9 million in attorneys’ fees to the winning parties. The state’s current Republican Secretary of State, Scott Schwab — who voted for the law as a legislator — delivered the epitaph: “It didn’t work out so well.”

The “Problem” Rounds to Zero

And it’s not just Kansas. Everywhere officials have looked for the noncitizen voting crisis, they’ve found a rounding error:

The Heritage Foundation itself — which advocates for the SAVE Act — found 68 documented cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s out of over a billion ballots cast; a rate of 0.0000001% (!). Utah reviewed its entire voter list of two million registrants and found one noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. Georgia audited 8.2 million voters and found 20 noncitizens. The Brennan Center found 30 suspected cases across 23.5 million votes. This isn’t a policy responding to a problem. It’s a solution in search of a pretext.

The bill is also set to take effect immediately, which is fairly insane to think about such a radical change to the rules of voting mere months before an election. I’m old enough to remember when supposedly Good Governance dictated that we leave a Supreme Court seat empty for an entire year — allegedly so “The People” could have their say on this important lifetime appointment. If the precedent is supposed to be that no major structural changes happen during an election year, then how does the right wing justify the sudden about face? It’s okay only when a Republican is in office, no doubt.

Kansas at Scale

The SAVE America Act is Kansas’s disaster, federalized and supercharged. In addition to the proof-of-citizenship registration requirements, it would force states to hand voter roll data to DHS with no safeguards on how it’s used, criminalize election workers who register someone without the right paperwork — even if that person is a citizen — and effectively eliminate online registration, mail registration, and automatic voter registration programs used by millions.

It passed the House in February 2026. The Senate opened debate March 17. Prediction markets give it roughly an 11% chance of becoming law. Trump has threatened to block all other legislation — including DHS funding during a partial shutdown — until it passes. A leaked 17-page executive order draft would require all 211 million registered Americans to re-register in person if the Senate doesn’t comply.

SAVE Act Network Graph Explorer

Explore the web of people, organizations, and money behind the push.

Open full screen ↗

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Kansas proved that proof-of-citizenship laws don’t catch noncitizen voters. They catch citizens. The 31,000-to-39 ratio isn’t a bug — it’s the feature. And the bill doesn’t need to pass the Senate to serve its real purpose: manufacturing a narrative that “Democrats are blocking election security,” setting the stage for executive overreach, filibuster destruction, or post-election delegitimization.

The Kansas cautionary tale isn’t that the policy is flawed. It’s that it works exactly as intended — just the opposite of the way they’re selling it.

Read more

The SAVE Act explainer -- voter suppression disguised as "integrity," delivered by people with no integrity

In this video, we break down the SAVE Act (H.R. 22) — a bill that demands documentary proof of U.S. citizenship just to register to vote in federal elections. It sounds reasonable for about 3 seconds, until you realize it’s a voter suppression machine dressed up in a flag pin. It is the legislative endrun around democracy that Trump promised when he told voters on the campaign trail that “you won’t have to vote anymore!”

What is the SAVE Act?

The “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require a passport or birth certificates paired with photo ID before you can register. For the roughly 21 million eligible citizens who don’t have easy access to those documents — disproportionately elderly, low-income, rural, Indigenous, and minority voters — it’s a wall. By design.

The problem it claims to solve doesn’t exist

Continue reading Watch: The SAVE Act — Solving imaginary voter fraud with very real disenfranchisement
Read more

The nation’s top law enforcement officer is supposed to be the people’s lawyer. Instead, we got a corporate lobbyist who spent six years at Ballard Partners repping Qatar, Amazon, GM, private prisons, and Pfizer — then waltzed into the DOJ without disclosing any of it as a potential conflict. She listed exactly two conflicts on her committee paperwork: a policy institute gig and her brother’s law practice. That’s it. Thirty-plus clients and the government of a foreign nation, and Pam Bondi basically said “nothing to see here.”

Since her confirmation, Ballard Partners has become the highest-paid lobbying shop in D.C. and taken on ten new clients with business directly before Bondi’s DOJ — more than they had in the first Trump and Biden administrations combined. One of those clients, American Express Global Business Travel, paid Ballard $200K to lobby Bondi’s DOJ — after which the department conveniently dropped its challenge to a $540 million merger that would have let Amex GBT devour its biggest rival.

Then there’s Qatar. Bondi lobbied for the Qatari government. Then as AG she personally signed a DOJ memo blessing Qatar’s $400 million luxury jet gift to Trump. When the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued for that memo? Her DOJ stonewalled. Meanwhile, Trump announced a shiny new golf resort deal with a Qatari government-owned company. Totally unrelated, surely.

Oh, and remember the Trump University $25K donation her Florida AG office received right around the time fraud complaints landed on her desk — after which she declined to investigate? The IRS literally penalized Trump’s foundation for that one, and yet here she sits.

This isn’t a conflict of interest. It’s a business model.

Read more

Alex Pretti just before he died at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis

There was a weird controversy that set in after the events of the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in which a neo-Nazi 8chan bottomfeeder killed Heather Heyer by running her over with his car, while injuring 19 others. It was a shocking moment for the nation and all Trump had to say about it was they condemned violence “on many sides, on many sides” — though there were only two sides, and only one of those two sides had killed someone.

A couple of days later he managed to get through a scripted teleprompter statement explicitly condemning white supremacists and neo-Nazis only to walk it back again and then double down on it the following day, saying “The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement… What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs—and it was vicious and it was horrible. You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

First of all, both sides did not have clubs. One side had tiki torches and a car that killed someone while the other side was armed with hymnals and homemade signage. Secondly — where were those “other” fine people? The vagueness allows for almost any interpretation — were some of the people with clubs “very fine” despite beating others about the head? Were some of the people who didn’t have clubs themselves but were cheering on the people with clubs “fine people”? Maybe there was a gathering of small invisible fairies merely caught up in the shuffle and Trump wanted to just make sure that possibility didn’t get overlooked and this innocent group of delicate souls unnecessarily besmirched?

The primary chosen “debunk” that detractors ended up going with from the wet clay of Trump’s stilted statement alleges that the *other* side Trump meant by “both” were simply innocent local townsfolk objecting to the removal of a statue of their beloved hero Robert E. Lee. Besides the fact that the right-wing has failed to this day to produce a shred of evidence that such people were even there, and the inconvenient reality that the rally was openly marketed as a white supremacist event, organized by avowed white nationalist organizations, it doesn’t even matter if they could produce such evidence — because those people are still not very fine! Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States and exalting him is not good!

Robert E. Lee Was Not a Fine People

In fact, Robert E. Lee was a terrible human being whose noble cause was maintaining his ownership of other human beings — as well as a shitty general who paid zero attention to the battle after giving a set of static orders and hoping God would sort out the rest. All he had to do was defend the borders of his baby white homeland, but he was an arrogant showboat who couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to go attacking Pennsylvania for no good reason.

He was also a senseless butcher who had the highest casualty rate of the entire war, being so reckless with his soldiers’ lives that he may as well have fed them into a woodchipper. He chewed through his entire army of 100,000 only 14 months into the campaign and by the war’s end had effectively annihilated his original army multiple times over through cumulative losses, as well as obliterating a whopping 30% of the total Confederate forces overall despite leading only one army in one theater.

Continue reading There aren’t plenty of fine people on both sides
Read more

They do not care about you — you are expendable to them. They do not GAF. Especially now with AI — they are gonna replace you anyway brah! At best they are biding time putting you on a drip feed of murder porn and revenge fan fic until the moment they are completely certain they’ve hijacked the electoral system at which time you too, buddy, will be shown the airlock into a deep space void no one will ever hear you from because they have all the powers of the earth to override whatever puny narrative you may have had for yourself.

You will be crushed like a bug 1000x tinier than Kafka’s roach — millions at a time under the heels of casually sadistic billionaires many of whom were Democrats up until 5 minutes ago when someone offered them a deal to cut their tax bill in exchange for a measley few million dollars. It’s “irrational” to not take the deal. You have to take the deal. Your competitors have taken the deal. You’d be the only chump not taking the deal. It’s the Art of the Deal, right?

Deals are all that matter. Transactionality is all there is — including reducing the beautiful, awe-inspiring teachings of Jesus to a mere materialistic creed, draped in a flag, shouted from a bullhorn, fired into an already capsized boat, and shot into the heads of innocent bystanders if they don’t comply with conflicting directives.

Read more

Liberal Tears illustrates the sneering cynicism of the right wing who refuse to articulate political values

There’s something conspicuously absent from American political discourse: actual discussion of values and the morals, ethical choices, and beliefs that go into the creation of good government policy.

Think about the last major political debate you watched, or the last campaign ad that stuck with you. How much of it was about what government should do versus who you should hate? How much was articulating a vision for society versus performing dominance over the out-group?

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

When your policy positions are wildly unpopular — when majorities oppose you on healthcare, taxation, abortion, climate change, guns, and wages — you don’t engage on the substance. You change the subject. You make politics about identity, grievance, and tribal belonging. You turn every election into a referendum on vibes rather than vision.

The American right has become extraordinarily sophisticated at this evasion. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem designed not to argue for right-wing values, but to ensure those values never have to be argued for at all. And the Trump administration is chock full of people from that media ecosystem.

The Polling Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable reality the modern right has to navigate, and we need to trumpet: their actual policy preferences are not popular.

Exposed to the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, majorities supported them — even among Republicans. Majorities support raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and Medicare, acting on climate change, keeping abortion legal in most cases, and implementing universal background checks for gun purchases. On issue after issue, when you strip away the partisan framing and ask people what they actually want government to do, the “conservative” position loses.

This creates a strategic problem. You can’t win elections by articulating positions most people reject. So you articulate… something else.

The Retreat from Argument

Meanwhile, the right-wing has indefensible values, which is why they no longer even bother to try to articulate them. Instead, they express them obliquely through “memes” and mores that evince cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, domination, supremacy, greed, selfishness, and contempt for vulnerability — all while maintaining plausible deniability through irony, “just asking questions,” and the ever-ready accusation that anyone who names the pattern is being hysterical or unfair.

This is the function of the perpetual rhetorical shell game: you can’t pin down a position that’s never stated plainly. The cruelty gets expressed through policy and aesthetic, but when challenged, retreats behind procedural objections or “economic anxiety.” The bigotry shows up in who gets mocked and who gets protected, but is never admitted as such — it’s always reframed as “common sense” or “tradition.”

Continue reading The Quiet Part Loud: Why the right stopped talking about values
Read more

progressive capitalism as articulated by Ro Khanna as interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson

After last night’s solid trouncing of the entire GOP steez by the Democrats in elections coast to coast (p.s. don’t miss Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech — it’s a banger), the time is ripe for articulating a new vision of the American Dream. And the vision of progressive capitalism is sounding like the right tone for a nation state that wishes to remain the leader of the free world.

I believe there is pent-up energy in the Democratic reservoir — with a deep bench of political talent of people who actually seem to care about other people. And who actually understand and exalt the real promise of America — as a beacon of hope for a new experiment in self-governance — if we can keep it.

One of those politicians is Ro Khanna, who represents the bulk of Silicon Valley in his California district. He recently sat down with my favorite historian of all time, Heather Cox Richardson, to talk about the vision of progressive capitalism for lifting us out of this moment of reactionary pessimism and “nostalgia populism” — a promise he says is fake in the age of AI because it won’t generate real opportunity (I agree). The following video is a great introduction to this promising vision for a way out of the quagmire we feel ourselves in.

What is progressive capitalism?

Progressive capitalism summary

1. What Khanna means by “progressive capitalism”

  • Khanna argues that place matters: for decades, US policy has let capital go wherever it wants and told people in hollowed-out towns, “move if you want opportunity.”
  • His version of progressive capitalism says:
    • Markets and free enterprise are valuable for freedom and innovation, but
    • Government must intentionally invest in people’s health, education, and communities so they can actually develop their capabilities where they live.
  • He calls for a national economic development strategy — a kind of “Marshall Plan for the United States” — tailored to each region:
    • Advanced manufacturing in some places
    • Trade schools and tech institutes (AI, data, cyber) so people don’t have to leave small towns
    • Jobs in healthcare, education, childcare, and elder care

2. Care economy and tech economy, not either/or

  • Heather Cox Richardson pushes him on care work (childcare, elder care, education), noting it’s already present in every community, dominated by women and immigrants, and chronically underinvested in.
Continue reading Progressive Capitalism: A vision for the future
Read more