The most contentious claim in Alexander Keyssar's The Right to Vote may also be the simplest: "Class tensions and apprehensions constituted the single most important obstacle to universal suffrage in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s." Though the story of suffrage is often told as a story of racial and gender progress – and it is that – Keyssar's argument is that the people who built and maintained systems of exclusion were not primarily motivated by racism or misogyny. They were motivated by the fear that political power would be redistributed downward if there were too many voters.
The SAVE Act, currently roiling the Senate, requires documentary proof of citizenship – a passport, a birth certificate – to register to vote. Its architects have presented it as a solution to the non-existent (or at least rarely documented) problem of voter fraud and its critics have, more plausibly, dismissed it as an attempt to suppress turnout for the midterms. But that's not really the whole point. What the SAVE Act actually does is demand that citizens provide information to a state unwilling to provide information to its citizens. That is not how a political elite manufactures consent or manages an electorate. That is how a ruling elite ignores one.
The Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca drew a distinction between a political elite – one that derives its authority from governing and therefore requires the appearance of popular consent – and a ruling elite, which governs through ownership or force and requires no such thing. The difference is the direction of accountability. A political elite releases public records because it’s obligated to the electorate. A ruling elite demands loyalty despite not releasing public records (even if required to do so under penalty of law2).
The political scientist James Scott observed that modern states make populations legible to themselves – through birth certificates, passports, documentation systems – in order to administer, tax, and control them. But a democratic bargain is struck. States are subject to transparency laws. They have to answer FOIA requests and release files demanded by Congress and the public. We see you because you see us.
What the SAVE Act represents is the first part of the Trump administration's modified formulation. We see you and you don't see us.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the SAVE Act's impact on women and the poor. Both are real. But as Keyssar suggests, those impacts have always been in service of something larger than the groups they target. Consider the math: the documentation burden falls hardest on the 69 million married women whose birth certificates don't match their married names – a population that, per Pew Research, skews Republican. The rural poor most burdened by passport requirements are overwhelmingly Trump voters. If this is a straightforward electoral suppression scheme, it is a remarkably moronic one. The more plausible conclusion is that the target isn't a voting bloc or just women who have complicated relationships with their fathers. It's class – a class that's almost invisible because it doesn’t think of itself in those terms.
The sole reason the bill has even a modicum of popular support is that the SAVE Act pulls the political and cultural elites reviled by MAGA into the broader proletariat. Under the new ruling elite, credentials don’t matter. Papers do. For those without credentials, that looks empowering. It's a similar dynamic to the one observed by W.E.B. Du Bois when he watched poor white workers in the Reconstruction South accept lower wages in exchange for the status of not being Black. If you're an asshole, the subjugation of others feels like elevation.
What those supporting the bill may not have fully priced in is the potential cost of punishing a political elite that they feel failed them by elevating a ruling elite that doesn't care about them at all. Trump's ruling elite has demonstrated a profound lack of interest in the will of people not only by embracing the Big Lie but by implementing policies utterly at odds with its leader's campaign promises and stated priorities3. That's because the project of a ruling elite isn't legitimacy, it's centralizing power. The SAVE Act does that by making voting contingent on documentation the state controls – and, more worryingly, by complicating the process to the point where incumbent cheating becomes easier to hide. Chaos ensured when similar rules were implemented in Kansas. That’s the point.
Ruling elites don't play to win. They play not to have to play at all.
The founders, a ruling elite in the absence of any democratic means of establishing a political one, resolved the question of who could vote by tying suffrage to property ownership. The logic, stated plainly by John Adams4, was that independent men – men freed from economic dependence – were the only citizens capable of dispassionate political judgment. But Franklin saw that argument for what it truly was: an excuse to rule rather than govern.
The story goes that the "First American" pushed back with this parable:
"Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers – but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?"
