The United States Senate is locked in a marathon fight over the SAVE America Act. A vote could happen any moment.
SAVE stands for "Safeguard American Voter Eligibility." This legislation would require proof of citizenship to register and then a photo ID to vote in federal elections. Both sides are dug in as if their lives depended on it.
Let's slow down and look at the actual problem this bill is supposed to solve.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal. It has been for decades. And it is vanishingly rare.
The Heritage Foundation has maintained a voter fraud database since 1982. That's over forty years of data. Hundreds of millions of ballots cast.
Would you like to know the total number (as of March 26) of documented fraud cases?
1,620.
Not per election. Not per decade. Total.
That number is even more extraordinary when you realize that Heritage is providing intellectual ammunition and support for the SAVE Act. The bigger the number, the more potent their argument. They don't see a small number, but an incomplete one. They believe there is far more fraud and this law would help them find it.
That's the crisis paralyzing the United States Senate.
So why are both sides of the political aisle behaving like the republic is hanging by a thread?
Here's a thought experiment.
Person A believes the gravest threat to American democracy is voter fraud.
Person B believes it's voter suppression.
You don't need to know anything else about them, and you'd already know A's political party and B's political party.
That's not a coincidence. The Conflict Machine pushes for that response.
People use the term "politics." What does that mean? The Conflict Machine is a more colorful, robust description of politics. It accurately describes a system to address social problems that divides members of societies into warring parties where there must be losers.
The Conflict Machine doesn't really resolve problems. It cultivates them. It keeps both sides in a state of low-grade, perpetual panic about what happens if the other team wins.
The maddening part is that both sides are correct!
Each one really is trying to steal something. Each one really is a threat to the other. It's not so much that their respective parties are lying to them, it's more that being inside the Conflict Machine distracts them from the deeper question.
Voluntaryists ask the deeper question.
Why does it matter so much who votes? Why do you care?
Because your fate is chained to theirs. Every election, every law, every regulation — whatever the majority decides gets decided for everyone. You don't get to opt out. You don't get to abstain from the consequences.
The person across town who disagrees with you on absolutely everything gets an equal vote on how you live your life. You get the same over theirs.
As a result, we're all part of a chain gang. Every last one of us. Shackled together, lurching in whatever direction the majority points.
And when your life is in the hands of millions of strangers, it matters enormously who those strangers are.
But here's what the Conflict Machine obscures from your view...
It shouldn't matter at all. You shouldn't be chained in the first place.
The undocumented immigrant in Arizona. The hippie from Oregon. The West Virginia redneck or Wall Street investment banker. The tech worker in Silicon Valley. The atheist. The fundamentalist. You don't know them. They don't know you.
No stranger should have power over your life. That's not a power any of us should hold over each other.
The SAVE America Act doesn't fix that.
Opposing the SAVE America Act doesn't fix that.
The problem was never which strangers. The problem is the chain gang itself.
Both partisan sides are simply arguing about which strangers get to run your life. They want to curate the chain gang. Stack it with their people.
They want to... Win.
What if it didn't matter who voted because their vote couldn't touch your life? What if the ballot box lost its power to reshape your existence?
When the government can take your money through taxation, then employ people with badges and guns who will compel your compliance — it doesn't matter how virtuous the cause is.
Coercion is coercion. Violence and theft diminish human happiness and harmony. Always. That's the Natural Principle of Human Respect.
But in a society built on Human Respect, no one is forced to fund things they oppose. No one can weaponize the State to impose their preferences on their neighbors. That means...
Your neighbor's politics stop being a threat to your livelihood.
The person who votes differently can no longer reach across town and rearrange your life.
Now let's return to voter ID — because even in a voluntary society, some things would still be decided by group action. But it would look nothing like the U.S. Conflict Machine.
Neighbors might gather to work out how trash gets collected, or how roads get cleared after a snowstorm. Small, local, practical.
Here's the part that matters most: Everyone in that room would know each other. No need to check credentials at the door. Indeed, the people doing the deciding would be the very same people directly affected.
That's the voluntaryist answer to the voting crisis — not a new law to stop fraud, nor a new protection against suppression.
The practice of Human Respect includes evolving beyond the coercive machinery that makes the stakes so unbearably high in the first place.
So, we don't need the politicians to pass an Act to "Save America." It's more like we need to be saved from their actions.