Any day now the U.S. House of Representatives will be voting on the SAVE Act, which aims to disenfranchise millions of Americans. The Orwellian-named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship in order to registrer to vote or update registration after a change of address, name, or party.
The purported justification for this bill is to crack down on non-citizen voting – a phenomenon that happens so rarely it’s almost nonexistent. Citizenship is already required to vote, and government elections offices verify the identity of every registered voter. Fraudulent voter registration is typically punishable by years of jail time and heavy fines, and a non-citizen immigrant could be deported — which is why it almost never happens and doesn’t impact election outcomes.
The SAVE Act, on the other hand, will impact our elections and our democracy by preventing many of those who should be able to vote from doing so.
New voter registration and any registration change would require physically presenting documentation of citizenship to a government office in the form of a birth certificate, passport, REAL ID-compliant drivers license or ID, or other citizenship document. This would prohibit online, mail-in, and 3rd party voter registration.
It would also mean more than 21.3 million Americans would likely lose their right to vote because they don’t have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship.
This is particularly true of formerly incarcerated people, whose lives have likely been shaped by poverty, disability, and disruption, which isn’t conducive to saving a birth certificate or getting a passport. The bill’s in-person documentation requirements also make it impossible for people currently incarcerated in jail or prison in PA for non-felonies to register to vote as they had done previously.
Who else will be impacted (via 5calls.org):
- More than 140 million Americans do not have a passport, and elderly Americans are one of the demographic groups least likely to have one.
- 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s last name do not have a birth certificate that matches their legal name.
- Similarly, transgender people who change their name to reflect their gender identity may be denied new passports and become ineligible to register.
- Disabled people are already much more likely to encounter difficulty while voting compared to nondisabled voters; more stringent requirements will just make this worse.
- Citizens of color are three times more likely than White citizens to lack documents such as birth certificates, passports, naturalization certificates, or certificates of citizenship.
- An in-person registration requirement would prevent military members serving abroad from easily registering to vote.
The SAVE Act’s drastic rules changes will compel states to purge their voter rolls of many voters for possibly being noncitizens, with no notification required. This will no doubt disenfranchise actual citizens, the Brennan Center reports. The Act also holds election officials civilly and criminally liable for any registration mistakes, even if unintended, and even if no non-citizen gets registered. So will officials err on the side of denying voter registration?
The Republicans passed the SAVE Act in a party-line vote last year and have re-introduced this bill now that they control both chambers in Congress and the White House. They have identified it as a top legislative priority. We must ensure every Democrat opposes it.