@Jumpmed when I disowned my dad, I changed my last name to my mom's (she had kept hers, and her name was way cooler anyway).

@sleepytako @amydiehl

@the_wub 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 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.

@bob_zim 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 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 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).

@bob_zim "SAVE Act would require birth cert or passport that matches voters legal name. "

So where and how is a person's "legal name" recorded?

In the UK there is the concept of "known as" which means that you can end up being called something other than is on your passport.

You can change the name on your passport without changing your legal name by deed poll to match it.

Not advisable as I found out trying to help a relative but I believe even now it is still possible.

@bob_zim We had a poll tax in the UK at the end of 1980s/early 1990s. Implicit in the law was that it would force people to remove themselves from the electoral roll in order to avoid paying the tax.

The only good that came out of it was that the opposition to the tax forced the resignation of Prime Minister Thatcher - an odious pro-Pinochet, neo-liberal, monetarist, Reaganite.

So maybe this tale gives some hope for you folks in the US.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax…

@bob_zim More recently another UK scandal related to legal identity and nationality in the form of the "Windrush scandal".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush…

@the_wub A lot of the US is heavily racist. After slavery was limited to prisoners, states used a variety of techniques to prevent Black people from voting. Poll taxes and poll tests (literacy tests, civics tests with biased answers) were favorites. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 explicitly made poll taxes illegal for federal elections. The Supreme Court of the United States also declared poll taxes unconstitutional in 1966.

Incidentally, the literacy tests are where the terms “grandfather clause” and “grandfathered in” come from. Many states allowed a man to skip the literacy test and vote if his father or grandfather had voted before 1867, a date selected to exclude most Black men.

@yPhil there's already a law against being a criminal, that's what made them a criminal. There are also already laws against election tampering and fraud.

Two states let felons vote while in prison.

If they've "paid their dues", then most places (eventually) let them vote again anyway.

Blocking upwards of a third of the population from voting because it might stop a handful of "criminals" is fucking ridiculous. If we wanted to do *that* and have fewer false-positives, we could just block straight men from voting—they make up ~93% of inmates¹—and that's with the fact that queer folx have arrest rates ~2.3× higher than straight people² (because the system is fucking busted).

Also, your argument is bullshit.

¹ prisonpolicy.org/reports/beyon…

² prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/03/…

@amydiehl

I'm not your honey, nor did I say "only" anywhere in my post. I even included "mostly" just to head off diversionary comments like yours.

You seem to be putting words in my mouth while intentionally missing the point of my original post.

But maybe if you walk me through it in baby steps, using smaller words I'll understand, then we can engineer this thing together, sweetheart.

@amydiehl

Thank you for your kind answer, no srsly ; so OK (in retrospect baby steps can sound condescending, it's actually not but I'm sorry if it... Nahh, you understood) so OK, we're on the same page.

Name changing is a problem, in a society basically based upon it. I'm not talking social credit here, I'm talking basic secular rules. You are supposed to be able to ask about/search the registers/google the person in front of you and know who they are. Can we agree on that?

@ruivo I'm a US citizen, as were my parents, and their parents, going back about as long as there's been a US.

I didn't take my spouse's name when I got married, but my birth certificate doesn't match my state ID or passport. I legally changed my name shortly after I became an adult, so I could get rid of my dad's last name (and my first name, because it was dumb).

At the time, I didn't have enough money to pay to update it everywhere, so I just never did.

I have a valid state ID and passport (well, my state ID has a nonbinary gender marker on it, so who knows if it'll be honored outside of Washington state 🤷🏼‍♀️ these days).

By the wording of the SAVE act, I don't think I'd be eligible to vote (for the first time since I turned 18).

@amydiehl

@ruivo 🫂

@amydiehl

@FaithinBones they should already do that 😋

But more importantly, we should call out this legislation for what it is—an attempt to lock out non-MAGA voters and rig an election.

@amydiehl