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I’m looking at the prospect of being stranded in Houston, where I traveled last week to help my mother convalesce from a broken hip. My brother and sister-in-law, who live in Houston, had a two-week cruise scheduled, so I came to town to fill in for them while they’re on vacation.

I’m glad that my mother is doing much better and I’m helping her to get out more so she recovers faster. When I broke my ankle in 2000, a big key to my recovery was walking regularly, something that’s a lot easier to do in New York City than in a car-centric place like Houston. I definitely miss being able to walk everywhere and take public transportation when the distance is too great. In fact, I’m now trying to arrange a ride to and from downtown Houston on Saturday, because I’m planning to attend the No Kings! rally here.

In the meantime, the No Kings! rally is becoming even more necessary, thanks to our deranged leader’s poorly planned war of choice against Iran and his refusal to approve legislation to pay TSA workers unless the same ICE paramilitaries who killed two protestors in Minneapolis and have been brutalizing Black and brown people with impunity for more than a year are given free rein. Now he’s added another condition — the passage of the SAVE Act, which will create massive barriers to voting. He said it himself. The SAVE Act would “guarantee the midterms” and Republicans would “never lose a race. For 50 years we won’t lose a race,” thus rendering federal elections meaningless like elections in Russia, Belarus, and Türkiye.

When I married Richard Lachmann 40 years ago, I changed my name. As a result, I stand to be disenfranchised with the SAVE Act, because my name doesn’t match my birth certificate. Yes, I have a passport, but it expires next year, and in a dictatorship, passports are privileges to be bestowed on regime supporters and rescinded for those who run afoul of the regime. The SAVE Act also requires states to turn over their voter rolls, allowing the federal government to see each citizen’s party registration. The result could be the automatic de-registration of Democrats and people with foreign-sounding surnames, and those people will then have to travel in person to federal offices to prove their citizenship in order to get back on the rolls. For women who changed their names, there is no provision to do so. Elderly people who cannot travel will also be disenfranchised. The documents to prove citizenship, including a passport (that can easily be withheld) cost money. Technically that’s a poll tax, prohibited by the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as a result of 1960s civil rights activism. But don’t count on the Supreme Court to follow the Constitution. Six out of nine justices serve one man.

So I’m not complaining about standing in a four-hour TSA line to get home, or being stranded in Houston altogether. My right to vote in federal elections is worth more than the inconvenience. I feel terrible for the TSA employees who are coming to work even though they’re not being paid (they are entitled to back pay but not interest for the amount the government has kept from them) and the ones who are having to call out or quit because they’ve taken other jobs or because they can’t afford the elevated price of gasoline to get to work.

Voting is sacred. It’s the only way we can get rid of politicians who don’t care about us, those who steal from us, and those who actively  harm us. If we do not have the right to vote, we have no way to hold those politicians accountable. Russians don’t get to vote in free and fair elections; instead, they are forced to vote for Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. In return, they live in poverty, endure strict censorship and internet blackouts, witness the murder of opposition journalists and politicians, and sacrifice their children to a brutal war of choice against neighbor Ukraine, all so Putin and his family can amass some 246 billion dollars stolen from the country and its people.

Are we headed the way of Russia? Only by insisting on every citizen’s right to vote in free and fair elections, free of onerous restrictions that seek to disenfranchise us, can we avoid the same fate.