The SAVE America Act is a poll tax in disguise

A blueprint to deprive millions of their vote

On January 7, 1861, the fiery senator from Georgia, Robert Toombs, warned his colleagues that a breakup between North and South over slavery could no longer be prevented.

Invoking a Greek myth, he argued that the abolitionists and their supporters, “have for long years been sowing dragons’ teeth, and have finally got a crop of armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved.”

He accused northern senators of seeking to violate the constitutional rights of southern states and to overturn “our social system.”

“Your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race in a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people…”

Claiming to speak for the people of his state—even those who didn’t own slaves—he declared, “This is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other…”

The South would go on to lose the civil war. But that didn’t end the determination of many white Georgians to deny freed blacks the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes, literacy tests, primaries in which only whites could vote and terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan nullified the power of black voters for decades.

“The First Vote” cast by ex-slaves during Reconstruction, in 1867. (By Alfred R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly)

Today’s moves to disenfranchise voters have more complex motivations than simply race. But the onerous requirements of President Donald Trump’s proposed SAVE America Act could sharply depress turnout, particularly among the poor and minorities.

As the New York Times noted, current law mandates that those registering to vote provide a driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Under Trump’s proposal, the Times reported:

Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote. That would limit mail or online registration, and direct voters to local election offices instead. There, they would have to produce documentary proof of U.S. citizenship such as an enhanced form of REAL ID — a state identification card compliant with federal regulations — that indicates American citizenship; birth certificate; passport or military identification card.

The bill would also mandate that all voters present a government-issued photo ID at polling places. Those seeking to vote by mail would have to enclose a copy of photo identification both when requesting a ballot and when returning it.

States would be required to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, to be cross-referenced with citizenship data and purged of those deemed ineligible to vote. And election workers who fail to properly verify an applicant’s eligibility to vote could face criminal penalties.

The new law would go into effect immediately, with the midterm elections a little more than three months away. It could unleash chaos at polling places as officials ask for costly or difficult-to-obtain credentials that an estimated 21 million Americans lack. The financial burden of getting the needed credentials amounts to a new poll tax.

“The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately,” according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. “Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.”

For all practical purposes, it would essentially kill the popular option of voting by mail.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Sen. Lisa Murkowski explained why she’s against the bill being pushed by the president and members of her party.

“The president is right that we should protect the security of our elections,” Murkowski wrote. “But we can’t make it harder for American citizens to cast their ballots, because free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

In her state, Alaska, online registration is vital, since there are only six election offices where people could prove they were qualified to vote: “Six places in a state more than twice the size of Texas, where roughly 80% of our communities, and about 20% of our population, aren’t connected by road…”

“Say you are an 18-year-old living in Savoonga, on a remote island in the Bering Sea, who wants to register to vote for the first time. If the SAVE America Act passed, your only option would be to buy a ticket on Bering Air to Nome, which runs about $780 round-trip. A night at the Aurora Inn would be more than $300. So, not counting food and local transportation, it would cost more than $1,000 just to register to vote.”

Other states face far less severe challenges, but there are a myriad of particular issues. The wisdom of a locally administered electoral system in a country as big as the United States seems evident.

Congressional Republicans are faced with a choice: Disobey Trump or destabilize the system that put them in office, which has experienced few instances of voter fraud and is popular with the folks back home.

Trump is attacking a voting process that elected him twice, with the bizarre explanation that the 2024 victory over Joe Biden was “too big to rig.” In this sense he is the ultimate sore winner.

Yet those who attribute Trump’s zeal for the SAVE America Act to his inability to get over his loss in 2020 may be missing the point. The president likely isn’t primarily trying to rewrite history so much as shaping the future: by questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections and weakening the GOP’s opponents in the 2028 balloting for the presidency.

Robert Toombs

Robert A. Toombs (Photo by Mathew Brady)

When Robert Toombs spoke, people listened. “He could be kind, pushy, funny, arrogant, charming, eloquent, sarcastic, dedicated, slovenly, candid, manipulative, and a host of other dispositions that his mood or the circumstances required,” his most recent biographer Mark Scroggins observed.

Raised by an affluent planter family that traced its roots back to Virginia and England, his childhood nickname for a while was Runt. But he grew to be six feet tall, with a powerful torso that served him well for speechifying.

In his sophomore year at Georgia’s Franklin College, “the fifteen-year-old Toombs quickly earned a reputation for gambling, drinking, fighting, foul language, and other hell-raising,” Scroggins wrote. One story about his student days “has a proctor discovering him as he is drinking and gambling with some friends. All of the students flee except for the inebriated Toombs who wobbily exclaims: “The guilty flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion!”

After imposing repeated fines and other punishments, the college expelled Toombs. He did much better at Union College, where he ranked 3rd among the 83 members of his graduating class. After taking up legal studies, he became one of Georgia’s highest paid lawyers, noted Scroggins. “By the 1870s, it was rumored that he would not touch a case for less than five thousand dollars.”

By 1837, he was living in a luxurious home with his wife and two daughters. They owned 53 slaves.

Toombs became active in Georgia’s States Rights party. He had voted for Andrew Jackson, but looked down upon the populist president’s followers and Jackson’s opposition to the argument that states had the right to nullify federal laws.

Following his elections to the state legislature and eventually Congress, Toombs’ speeches stood out. Skilled at dropping in literary allusions, he became what one writer described as a “bold, fluent, sarcastic speaker.” He could be charming in person, but as one associate recalled, “He was haughty, imperious, and overbearing, intolerant and impatient of contradiction.”

One example of his acid tongue: Toombs said President James Polk was the “vilest poltroon that ever disgraced our government,” a “sharp district politician without statesmanship or patriotism.”

Scroggins gives us this portrait of Toombs, relying on an account by the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis:

He was considered handsome, even though he was negligent about his “toilet and dress.” Varina Howell Davis was taken with him. “His coloring was good, and his teeth brilliantly white, but his mouth was somewhat pendulous and subtracted from the rest of his strong face,” she wrote. “His eyes were magnificent, dark and flashing, and they had a certain lawless way of ranging about that was indicative of his character.” Mrs. Davis was particularly struck by his hands. She described them as “beautiful,” and wrote that they were “kept like those of a fashionable woman.”

For more than 15 years, as a member of the House and later the Senate, Toombs had used his ample oratorical skills to insist that the U.S. Constitution protected the South’s property interest in the enslaved.

Through all the debates about the potential expansion of slavery to new territories, Toombs argued the south’s side while trying to support compromises to preserve the union. But by the presidential election of 1860, with the prospect of Republican Abraham Lincoln winning, he had lost hope.

Scroggins wrote:

In October, Toombs traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and dared the nation to elect a Repbulican: “Let the night which decides the election of Lincoln be ushered in by the booming of hostile cannon of the South,” he roared to the cheering crowd. In Atlanta, one witness said that Toombs “spoke like a madman and acted like a fanatic.” But the nation answered right back on November 6 when Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won the presidential ticket.

Toombs maintained that “black people were unfit to have political power and incapable of living as freemen.” The prospect of civil war didn’t scare him: “Wars are to history what storms are to the atmosphere — purifiers.” He told a student interviewer that, ““We are the gentlemen of this land, and gentlemen always make revolutions in history.”

Toombs would go on to become the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, a job he detested, and later a brigadier general in the rebel army, where he clashed with higher-ranking professional officers.

His ambition to become president of the Confederacy was dashed. A close friend and Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, “believed Toombs blew the presidency because he drank too much. ‘He was in the habit of getting tight every day at dinner,’ Stephens wrote bluntly to his half-brother, Linton. A day or two before the election, Toombs drank more than was good for him at an important banquet. Then he went to a late party, got even drunker, and made a spectacle of himself,” according to Scroggins.

After the Civil War, he fled to Cuba and Europe to avoid arrest for his role in the rebellion. Though Toombs returned to Georgia and resumed practicing law, he never renounced his Confederate beliefs nor took an oath of loyalty to the U.S. And he never abandoned his opposition to blacks voting.

“He believed since their livelihood depended on those who owned property—such as himself—their votes could be manipulated,” Scroggins wrote. “There was no harm in blacks voting as long as the whites all belonged to one party, he said. But he feared the time when whites would divide and blacks would be courted by ‘the lower classes of white men.’ If this coalition formed a majority it might attack the interests of the ‘landed proprietors’—like himself.”

To Toombs, the KKK was a positive force. “There is no evidence that Toombs himself ever wore a hood, rode with, or was a member of the Klan. But he certainly approved of their purposes and probably knew a great deal about their activities. Toombs told a reporter that the Klan was the ‘natural protest of an oppressed people against tyranny’ and that the Klan ‘tempered’ the ‘despotism’ of the Radicals.”

In his post-war career, Toombs had his biggest impact as prime mover of a Georgia constitutional convention. The constitution that emerged in 1877 undid Reconstruction reforms that followed the Union victory. Georgia weaponized the poll tax to disenfranchise the freed slaves (along with poor whites). All 11 states of the former Confederacy would eventually adopt poll taxes.

The poll taxes had to be paid in advance of the elections, noted C. Vann Woodward, in Origins of the New South 1877-1913. “The tax receipts usually had to be preserved and sometimes presented twice, once to the registrar and once to the election official,” he wrote. The taxes were cumulative, so would-be voters often faced prohibitively high levies to establish their eligibility. Woodward quotes an Alabama politician as saying “We want that all tax to pile up so high that he will never be able to vote again.”

The voter suppression tactic worked. “In the mid-1940s, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax estimated that 10 million Americans were denied the right to vote because they simply could not pay,” wrote Carol Anderson, in One Person, No Vote.

Georgia’s $1-per-person poll tax was finally abolished by a reformist governor in the 1940s. But similar taxes in other states survived until the mid-1960s when the 24^th amendment, the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections finally ended them.

“Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, “the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”

Georgia’s vote

One day before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s win, a different kind of electoral upheaval took place in Georgia. Two Democrats—Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—were elected to represent the normally red state in the U.S. Senate.

Sen. Raphael Warnock and Rep. John Lewis.

Trump had failed in his bid to nullify Biden’s victory in the state. On January 2, 2021, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and attempted to persuade him, through a number of fallacious arguments, that he won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes. Then Trump said, “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

Shortly before 4 a.m. on January 7, Congress put an end to Trump’s hopes by certifying Biden’s victory, including the 16 electoral votes cast by Georgia for the Democrat.

On March 18 this year, a little more than 165 years since Robert Toombs angrily resigned from the Senate, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock spoke in the chamber.

“I rise today as a child of the Civil Rights movement,” he said. He described himself as “a member of only the second generation of our nation to have full and fair access to the right to vote. …”

“Every American citizen must have access to the franchise, and it must not be treated as a privilege; it is a right. And when you put up unnecessary barriers, you undermine that basic understanding…We know that this will disenfranchise thousands, if not millions of Americans.”