This week at Democracy Docket: Telling the truth about the SAVE America Act when legacy media won’t

As MAGA Republicans ramp up their push for the SAVE America Act, the legacy media is doing its best to treat the right’s lies about the bill as serious arguments.

The New York Times gave prominent, respectful coverage to the claim — once widely recognized as an obviously false conspiracy theory — from the measure’s backers that it’s “crucial to salvaging [the GOP’s] dimming chances of winning the midterm elections,” because it would prevent massive Democratic voter fraud. 

Democracy Docket’s coverage of the SAVE America Act has been very different. 

As our Jim Saksa reported this week, even election administrators who support the bill’s draconian provisions worry that implementing the measure before the midterms, as its language calls for, won’t allow nearly enough time to ensure things run smoothly. 

“With election law, you need to give the states time to put those laws into place, train the people on them, get the voters educated on it,” the elections director for ruby-red Paulding County, Georgia told Jim, stressing that she backs the bill’s documentary proof of citizenship and photo ID requirements. “You don’t need to rush into something like this.”

And Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson highlighted comments from President Donald Trump that made clear the push for the bill is driven not by genuine concern about noncitizen voting, which simply doesn’t exist at significant levels, but by ruthless partisanship.

“Republicans have to win this one,” Trump told a Georgia crowd, referring to the fight to get the measure through the Senate and to his desk.

If they succeed, “we’ll never lose a race,” Trump added. “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

Still, the right-wing effort to build support for SAVE America by ginning up fake stories about voter fraud continues unabated. Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen took the time to debunk two recent viral videos — one shot in Venice, California, the other in Fulton County, Georgia — that claimed large numbers of people are registered to vote at non-residential addresses, portraying their findings as evidence of rampant fraud.

These videos, explained a Democratic Fulton County commissioner, “are really being done as an excuse to kick more people legitimately off the rolls.” 

Meanwhile, Democracy Docket has led the field in exposing the troubling backgrounds of the lawyers being hired by the Department of Justice as it tries to obtain state voter rolls. Yunior Rivas this week exclusively revealed that an attorney now working on the effort in Wisconsin played a key role in the Trump campaign’s failed bid to subvert that state’s 2020 presidential results, including appearing on emails with leaders of the campaign’s corrupt “fake elector” scheme. 

Separately, the redistricting fight that Trump launched last year rages on, and Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice is still on top of it. 

This week, Jen reported on interviews she conducted with two volunteers who collected signatures for a Missouri ballot measure that would let voters veto the state’s GOP-backed gerrymander. The volunteers described intimidation and harassment aimed at stopping people from signing the petitions — apparently carried out by workers for a GOP-backed group that’s been promoted by Donald Trump Jr.

As we’ve reported, that same group, Patriot Grassroots, has been accused in Utah of handing in large numbers of fraudulent signatures in support of a Republican ballot measure that aims to restore lawmakers’ right to gerrymander the state’s maps. 

But it wasn’t all bleak. Democracy Docket’s Natalie Hausmann spotlighted an inspiring campaign led by North Carolina students to push back against a Republican scheme to scrap polling places on several college campuses in the state, including the nation’s largest HBCU.

“We’ve run into this issue before in North Carolina and we’ve been persistent,” one voting advocate told Natalie. “And when people are on the side of justice, justice does prevail.”