@alice @amydiehl And in 2017 a Washington Post poll found 75% of white male registered voters surveyed were registerd GOP and one third of them agreed with at least one statement out of a list of white nationalist statements.

It is a tossup whether ICE's brutal terrorism will change enough white make minds to reverse this. Note that historically only white men, in fact only landowning white men were permitted to vote in the US.

If they take away everyone else's votes and white voters hand the GOP a win this November, we can treat the entire election results as rigged and illegitimate. Any nonwhite votes cast and counted (even if only by exit polls) should then be extrapolated to estimate what votes would have been cast by those who were prevented from voting and used to challenge the outcome not just in courts but in the streets.

Such a brazenly stolen election will stir up a huge hornet's nest and may give us what we need to finish this conflict and throw down everything Trump and Project 2025 stand for. It will that is if we actively defend the election itself from Trump's interference understanding we may be defeated in that battle but the cost of that win for Trump may be decisive. If we convince everyone this is inevitable before November and its not a shock to the general public anymore, that hornet's nest will be a faint buzzing in the distance only.

There is also the chance the GOP makes this a white men only election by a decisive margin (say by tossing out 10+% of other voters) and the GOP gets stomped anyway. If THAT happens we are in an excellent position no matter how Trump responds.

@alice @amydiehl Also men who changed their name from William to Bill.

@amydiehl @alice A a white man who took his non-American wife's name, I'd also be disenfranchised as my name change was cosmetic. I'm also sure supporters of this crap bill think I did a beta move by doing so

@alice @amydiehl @shansterable also (and while it shouldn’t matter this might sway some folks) Catholic nuns, monks and priests - up to and including the Pope who often take new names when they take their vows.

(My aunt has been a Catholic nun for over 60 years - we in the family know her under one name. But her public name under which she has written books, led centers for the environment at universities and been a longtime lobbyist to Congress is her name she took when she took her vows)

@alice @amydiehl I think that those are exactly what its meant to 'save'. Evil again again.

@alice @amydiehl That also means the end to witness protection schemes.

How do you deal with an asylum seeker without papers? There is no birth certificate or passport to be found particularly in countries where civil society and the system of keeping of public records has broken down.

@alice @amydiehl

Ya know who's done that?

- Married women
- Trans & nonbinary folx
- Immigrants

No. A lot of plain criminals do that, too. It's a real problem.

@sleepytako @amydiehl @alice My wife and I both kept our names when we married (in academics it's a pita to prove authorship of something after a name change). We get confused looks regularly when people realize we have different last names. Most people are still living in the old world.
It also confuses people that our son has her last name. We did that mostly because her last name is far more interesting/unique than mine.

@alice @amydiehl

Just like the Founding Fathers intended

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl People with new identities courtesy of witness protection get birth certificates for their new names.

Very few countries allow asylum-seekers to vote in national elections at all, regardless of how well-documented they are. If one becomes a US citizen, they get a certificate of naturalization, which is explicitly listed as acceptable proof of citizenship in the bill.

This proposed law is awful, but those two specific concerns aren’t affected either way.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl Thanks for the clarification.

What I would be concerned with is that such new laws are often drafted in haste in the ideological fervour of the moment

Those that end up drafting such laws will either deliberately or just due to a complete lack of imagination and empathy create a whole host of additional situations where peoples' identity can become a problem for them.

Even for those who are already citizens of the US*.

* insert country of your choice.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl As regards asylum seekers, my thought was if they do get granted permission to stay, then how will the new laws affect them.

Not just when they are newly arrived but also should the seek US citizenship at a later date.

If you arrive without any papers then how can you prove an identity that matches your birth certificate and hence claim your right to vote as a US citizen.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have had a collection of experiences, related to the different way that the UK and most other European countries treat identity.

Some countries base your permission to stay on your birth certificate and others on the passport you present.

In my case the names on the two are not the same.

The UK demands that if you have two passports then the names on both must be identical.

But UK passports do not support accented characters found in other European alphabets.

@amydiehl @alice To be fair, immigrants that became citizens are very likely to have valid passports because of trips to visit friends and relatives

@alice @amydiehl

You know there is a saying in these here United States “where the women are nice and the men are ICE.” But many of the men and women in ICE job lines are brown.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl > If you arrive without any papers then how can you prove an identity that matches your birth certificate and hence claim your right to vote as a US citizen.

That’s already a problem today, regardless of this proposed law. It sucks because, yes, the people most in need of asylum protections are often the least able to produce documentation. The barrier is the naturalization process, though, and this proposed law doesn’t affect that.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Yeah, the EU+UK situation is separately awful, since there’s no super-state authority you can directly be a citizen of (i.e, you can’t be a citizen of the EU directly, only of a state within it). Instead, there’s a mess of individual states all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. Most allow non-resident citizens to vote. Some allow non-citizen residents to vote. Ridiculous, inconsistent documentation standards like the passport situation you mentioned. All based on imaginary lines on the ground.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl Before Brexit happened if there had been an "EU passport" I would have applied for it immediately.

Identity is a pain in the neck. In the UK you can choose the name that appears on your passport.

In the Netherlands and Norway people are all registered in the People Registers. So you get the name that you are officially registered with when you apply for a passport.

The UK has a perculiar way of dealing with legal identity and has no central register for all people.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have no idea how this is managed in the US though.

Is your legal identity registered at federal or state level?

Or not at all?

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Births are registered at the local level (county/parrish, below US state), but they confer citizenship at the federal level. The US federal government is the entity which issues passports and social security numbers (basically our national ID number for financial purposes). Driver licenses and most other non-passport IDs are managed by the US states. Depending on who is asking for identity and why, we may need a birth/naturalization certificate, passport, social security number, driver license/state ID number, or a paper utility bill (sometimes needed to prove residency for state and local elections).

US states run their own elections, so rules for voting are all over the place (which is why the USA doesn’t meet the minimum standards for election monitoring by the Carter Center).