The Papers of Our Citizenship
Voter Suppression by Another Name—Filed in Triplicate
By Dino Alonso
There are many ways to silence a person. Some are loud, some are slow, and some are disguised as paperwork.
They call it the SAVE Act—a bill dressed in the language of patriotism and protection. But what it seeks is not to save anything. What it threatens, if passed, is to strip millions of Americans of their voice in this democracy—quietly, bureaucratically, and cruelly.
It is not a wall. It is a lock. And the key is a piece of paper many Americans, especially women, were never asked to keep.
When a man passes a law in the name of “election integrity,” you must always ask who he believes has no integrity. And in this case, it is not undocumented people he fears. It is the everyday voter who has too many names, too few resources, or too much history to fit neatly in the folders of bureaucracy.
Women are particularly vulnerable. Why? Because we live in a country that still does not know what to do with a woman who changes her name, marries, flees, rebuilds herself, whose identity does not come laminated in plastic but scrawled across years of survival.
The SAVE Act tells these women: "You are not who you say you are unless you can prove it."
A marriage certificate. A divorce decree. A birth certificate with the “correct” name. And if she cannot produce these—if she doesn’t have the money, the time, the access—then she is cast out of the voting booth like a stranger in her own country.
This is not accidental. This is not oversight. This is the strategy.
When you cannot win the people, you narrow the definition of who the people are. You redefine citizenship not as shared responsibility but as paperwork. In doing so, you make the ballot box a gated community for those who already have power.
But let me remind you: this country was not built by people with perfect documentation. It was built by those who dared to speak—even when the law said their voices didn’t count.
So I ask you: what does this bill protect?
Not elections. Voter fraud by noncitizens is nearly nonexistent. It protects the illusion that democracy is only for the well-documented, the well-behaved, and the well-connected.
It protects the gate, not the people.
And it is women—Black women, rural women, poor women, married women, widowed women—who will be the first and the most brutal hit.
This bill does not seek truth—it seeks control. It is not a safeguard—it is a sorting mechanism. And its target is not fraud—it is you.
I do not write this as a partisan. I write it as a citizen. As someone who believes the ballot is sacred, not because of who it elects, but because of who it includes.
They want to tell you this is about national security. That’s about integrity. However, integrity does not come from locking the doors of democracy to the people it claims to represent.
Integrity means trusting your people enough to hear them.
Integrity means knowing that identity is not proved by a certificate but by a life lived in struggle, contribution, and faith that your voice still matters.
And when a government says it no longer trusts you to speak—unless you can prove who you are on demand—it is not safety they offer.
It is submission.