The Senate is moving today on the SAVE America Act and it’s worth breaking down exactly what’s in it, because the justification doesn’t hold up.
The entire premise rests on noncitizen voter fraud. But that’s already a federal crime, and it almost never happens. No credible evidence exists to back up the claims driving this legislation. So what does the bill actually do?
Anyone registering to vote would have to show up in person and produce documentary proof of citizenship a passport, birth certificate, or military ID. Mail and online registration would effectively be dead. Every voter would need a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Anyone voting by mail would need to include a copy of that ID both when requesting a ballot and when submitting it.
States would also be required to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, where they’d be cross-checked against citizenship data and scrubbed of anyone flagged as ineligible. Election workers who fail to verify applicants properly could face criminal charges.
And it doesn’t stop there any private citizen could sue an election official who registers someone without the required paperwork. That’s not accountability. That’s an open invitation for bad-faith litigation against public servants doing their jobs.
Here’s who gets caught in that net. About 21.3 million eligible American voters (roughly 9 percent) either don’t have the documents this bill requires or can’t get their hands on them quickly. Forty-five states don’t issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license that would even qualify under the bill’s standards. And the problem for women is far worse than most coverage lets on. Up to 69 million women who changed their name after marriage have birth certificates that no longer match their legal name and the bill makes no real accommodation for that. An affidavit option exists, but it’s an extra burden that no other voting law currently imposes.
Here’s something that’s getting almost no attention this isn’t just a barrier at first registration. Every time someone updates their registration (moves to a new address, changes their party affiliation) they’d have to produce the documents all over again.
The cost is staggering and entirely unfunded. Implementation is estimated to run more than 11 times current federal funding levels (around $510 million per election cycle) with nothing allocated to help states or counties cover it. Election offices would also need somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million additional training hours just for the initial rollout, at a time when many jurisdictions are already struggling to recruit poll workers. The criminal liability provisions in the bill will make that recruitment problem significantly worse.
If it passes, states would have to implement all of it before the midterms. That’s not election integrity that’s a deliberate scramble designed to leave millions of legitimate voters behind.
For now, the bill still has to clear a 60-vote threshold in the Senate to overcome the filibuster. Democrats are unified against it. That’s the wall unless Republicans decide to go after the filibuster next.
Source