South Dakota voter law www.rawstory.com/…
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power” — Orwell ‘1984’
History repeats
The state security forces in Communist countries were charged with uncovering and crushing dissent by any means. In East Germany, from the establishment of the state until the fall of communism in 1990, that agency was the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), aka, the Stasi.
In 2025, in a book titled, "Die Hauptamtlichen" ("Staffing the Stasi"), German historian Philipp Springer provided details of this dismal agency’s reach. He writes that around 90,000 people worked for the Stasi full-time, while another 100,000-200,000 East Germans were "informal collaborators." Springer explains why so many citizens were willing to rat out their fellow East Germans:
"One reason was the feeling of having power over your fellow citizens. And then there were the promises made by the ministry, which would claim that the job was interesting and might even allow for deployments abroad. At the end of the day, it was a very secure job to have — especially for people struggling with their career prospects."
The reader will be forgiven if this sounds like the rationale for so many to sign up for ICE jobs. Now, an American state has also hopped on the Stasi bandwagon. South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed legislation last week that allows individuals and election officials to challenge their fellow voters' citizenship status.
Solving a non-existent problem
Optimists might assume that states pass laws to address real concerns. In this case, the evidence suggests otherwise. No reputable study has identified systemic election fraud in the US. The 2020 election has been challenged in court repeatedly. The plaintiffs never proved the existence of any outcome-determinative fraud. Which is a fancy way of saying it was a free and fair election.
When it comes to illegal voting by aliens, the facts are stark. There is no evidence of anything more than vanishingly rare instances of non-citizens voting. Even in South Dakota. Here are the facts as reported by the South Dakota Searchlight:
In 2024, South Dakota officials discovered and cancelled the voter registrations of 273 non-U.S. citizens. The registrants had answered “no” on their driver’s license applications when asked if they were citizens, but were registered to vote due to human error, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. Noncitizens can obtain a driver’s license or state ID if they are lawful permanent residents or have temporary legal status, and the driver’s license application form includes a voter registration section.
One of those 273 noncitizens cast a ballot, the Secretary of State’s Office said. That was during the 2016 general election.
One instance of a non-citizen voting 10 years ago, and the state encourages its citizens to turn stoolie on their neighbors? It gets worse. The law imposes no penalty on people who make unfounded accusations about their neighbors. What’s to stop aggrieved citizens from pointing the finger at neighbors for reasons other than potential illegal voting?
In addition, every accusation, regardless of its motivation, requires the accused to prove they are eligible to vote. At the very least, it will take time and a search for documents. How many people will just not bother?
Either the authorities have no sense of proportion. Or the reason for the law is other than stated.
Small Government, Meet Your Stasi
If the latter is correct (and it is), this overreach is just another example of conservative hypocrisy. The American right presents itself as a fierce defender of liberty and beats the drum for small government. But their actions belie their rhetoric. When it comes to a police state, its goals mirror those of 20th-century communist regimes, not those of modern liberal democracies.
Witness the billions of dollars poured into the state security apparatus on the specious grounds of keeping the citizens safe. From what? Marauding gangs of homicidal foreign thugs? Where are they? I haven’t seen any.
The administration tells us we should be afraid, very afraid, of violent, criminal, illegal aliens. Yet every crime statistic shows crime rates, particularly murder, going down. And every analysis of foreigners in our midst shows they commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens.
Trump apologists might say that this is due to Trump’s long-needed immigration crackdown. But crime in America has been declining since Biden’s first year in office. And immigrants have long been more law-abiding than Americans.
“Trust me”
We should not be surprised. Fear-mongering is an autocrat’s tool. Anyone who has the bejesus scared out of them looks for a father figure to assure them everything will be OK. Then, in a bitter irony, it is the reassuring relative who becomes the source of terror.
To capture the cynicism of power through paternalism, Orwell named the governing authority in 1984 ‘Big Brother’. In contemporary America, Big Brother is a Republican.
