There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.
1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-me...
If it passes, as a democracy we're probably failed beyond repair in my lifetime.
If the failure of the SAVE Act was the only thing allowing a Democrat victory, then there's something seriously wrong with the American democratic system.
I mean don't Americans have at least one document issued by the state proving that they are, you know, American?
A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted."
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/will-save-act-prevent-marr...
Nearly every country I know of has solved the married woman name-change issue. The US literally does not have a process to manage official name changes?
It's literally so darn simple everywhere - previous official issued ID, marriage license copy, 2 newspaper ads stating the name change. There might be minor variations here and there depending on the country, but that's all you need to get your name changed anywhere on official documents. The real headache comes in changing previous unofficial documents afterwards, such as certificates, etc.
This is literally not an excuse for the Arsenal of Democracy.
For example, New Zealand.
That's overly alarmist. The one thing the US has going for it when it comes to elections is that they are run by the states, not by the federal government, which insulates them from a lot of possible election meddling.
Things like the SAVE Act are incredibly concerning, though. It's unclear if the worst provisions of it are even constitutional, but it's also unclear if SCOTUS will actually do the right thing if SAVE gets passed.
And certainly people are going to end up being disenfranchised, regardless of what happens, and of course more of them will be left-leaning voters. Higher voter turnout tends to give the GOP worse electoral results; they know this, so they focus on voter suppression. It's disgusting.
So yes, I think we should be worried, but your statement is overly alarmist and not helpful.
Ah, that's reassuring. I'm sure Republican state officials won't allege mass voter fraud in 2028 and discount votes they claim to be from illegals when it seems like the election isn't going their way. And I'm sure there won't be violence threatened against election workers from the voters for harboring such fraud, either.
I have been warning for years (often here on HN) that the US risks tilting into a failed state due to political extremism, and its generally been dismissed as an impossibility - there is no way, people insisted, that an extreme fringe could reshape the American polity because of the Constitutional guardrails, the rock-solid institutions, the societal norms. Well it's happening right in front of us now. Just this week we're seeing the National Science Foundation dismantled, the nonpartisan Librarian of Congress arbitarily fired, the President demurring on TV when asked about his duty to uphold Constitutional guarantees of due process.
You identify a bunch of looming electoral problems yourself. The problem is that it doesn't require a great deal of electoral corruption to sway the outcome. Some states will cheerfully go along with the executive's agenda, those that don't will be denounced as having rigged their own elections. The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal elections from conservatives forever. The right has been selling that argument for over 30 years, going back to Newt Gingrich.
What do you mean? Hasn't the USA pretty much ALWAYS done this?
>The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal elections from conservatives forever.
In fact, the whole hysteria is based on the existence of tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are committing huge numbers of crimes and are systematically discriminated against because of their illegal status. And when your political opponents so loudly try to deny such an obvious for everyone problem, it is stupid not to take advantage of it.
I don't know, maybe I don't understand American politics, but from the outside everything seems pretty clear to me.
> millions of illegal immigrants who are committing huge numbers of crimes
A trope wholly ungrounded in fact, which has been debunked any number of times.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-c...
What are you even talking about?
The US military budget is bigger than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined. It's always been outright bullying.
Or do you seriously think that such a budget was just for a beauty?
Oh, hello Trumpist Number. Like apparent “millions” who died in the Ukraine war.
And this kind of reaction is the main reason why the Democrats lost even the popular vote. Nice work.