Democrats have a favorite move whenever Republicans raise an alarm about an issue: wave it off. The concern is a myth, a moral panic, a right-wing fever dream that only a paranoid MAGA voter could take seriously. Then reality walks into the room with a stack of evidence, and Democrats act as if they've never seen any of it before.
We've watched this play out over and over. According to Democrats, men in women’s sports aren't an actual problem; women's bathrooms and locker rooms pose no safety risk at all, no matter how many documented cases pile up of men who "identify" as women assaulting women and girls in those spaces. Good guys with guns never stop mass shootings, except for all the times they have. Perhaps the most common examples of this phenomenon are related to our elections. They claim that American elections are perfectly secure (except when Donald Trump is trying to “rig” our elections) even as real fraud cases keep turning up. They also claim noncitizens don't vote in U.S. elections because it's illegal.
They actually say that with a straight face, yet back in July, Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) disclosed that roughly 6,600 people who indicated they weren't U.S. citizens ended up registered to vote. She claimed it was due to an error in the state's motor-vehicle system, but whistleblowers say it was by design. Officials said hundreds of them actually cast ballots.
And that's only what they were willing to admit. I wouldn't bet a nickel that the real number isn't that small.
Democrats can technically say that noncitizen voting is illegal, and they'd be right. So is speeding. A law on the books doesn't make a crime not happen, and the documented cases prove that "illegal" has never meant "never happens." Republicans want to make sure it truly never happens. Democrats fight every attempt to get there with the fury of people protecting something they value.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has run out of patience. Speaking on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Lee tore into Democrats and Republicans alike for stalling the SAVE America Act, his voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship bill. The midterms are only weeks away, and he knows exactly what's at stake.
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Lee's frustration followed a Reuters report, published the same day, that found more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens have been added to U.S. voter rolls across several states since 2000. Reuters pinned the registrations on "software glitches and clerical errors" and said its review pointed to "inadvertent bureaucratic failures, rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally."
Ironically, Reuters argued that the findings raised "questions about whether legislative efforts to require proof of citizenship for voter registration would eliminate the issue."
Seriously? They found 30,000 ineligible people on the rolls and decided the real question was whether checking citizenship would help. Whether those registrations were accidental or deliberate doesn’t matter. Noncitizens got on the rolls. Some of them almost certainly voted. Every one of those registrations proves the laws we already have don't work.
I guarantee the problem is much worse than Reuters was willing to admit. Lee made the same case on the floor, saying that "even though we have laws that prohibit things like noncitizen voting, those laws have been rendered difficult and essentially impossible to enforce."
Then he turned to the people who keep telling us there's nothing to see here.
"That thing that they claim never happens, voter fraud or noncitizen voting, just keeps happening over and over and over again," Lee said.
The solution, of course, is the SAVE America Act earlier this year, and Lee is urging Republicans to scrap the filibuster if it takes that to get it passed. The bill wouldn't close every gap, but it would close plenty of them and do a lot to shore up election integrity.
Obviously, that’s why Democrats hate it so much.
Now for the bad news. Even if the Senate passed it tomorrow, it would come too late to affect the 2026 midterms. It almost certainly won't pass before Election Day anyway.
I blame Republicans almost as much as Democrats for this mess. The GOP has had every chance to get the SAVE America Act done, and too many Republican senators keep treating the filibuster like a sacred relic. Make no mistake about it: the next time Democrats control Congress and the White House, they'll abolish the filibuster without a second thought and steamroll their agenda through. Republicans who protect it now are guarding a door Democrats plan to kick down. We can't let Democrats be the ones who get to use that power.
