Save us from the SAVE Act
It's the latest in a long line of Republican efforts to suppress the vote, but this effort is supercharged.
Call your senators! This terrible bill has already passed the House.
We need to talk about voting, part 2 of 3
Republicans would have you believe that “illegal aliens” are swarming the polls and casting votes in the millions in order to elect Democrats. It is a nonsensical, fantastical fiction that has somehow been sold to a large number of the American electorate, and this fiction is now being used to push the SAVE Act (or alternatively the Save America or the Make Elections Great Again Act). The SAVE Act is a “solution” to a problem that simply does not exist, and it will create significant problems for the citizens it purports to save by making registering to vote (or updating your registration) much more difficult.
Let’s review how voting works now:
If you want to register to vote in Alabama, you can do so online, or download a form to fill out and mail in, or request that a form be sent to you by mail. In every case, you will be asked for your driver’s license number (which in the U.S. serves as a de facto national identification card), or a non-driver ID card number, or for your Social Security number.
If you are in possession of any of these types of ID, your citizenship status has already been verified.
When you turn up at the polls on election day, you will present a photo ID (36 states require a photo ID) to the nice poll worker (they are always nice) and have your address checked against the voter rolls. If you look like your picture and your name is in the book, you get to cast a vote.
Most of us have participated in and witnessed this process for many, many years of our lives. Perhaps you have even been a poll worker yourself; I have worked the polls a half a dozen times, and every time has been a thrill (seriously). Did you know that election workers take an oath at the start of election day? Every single person I have worked with at the polls has demonstrated an unshakeable commitment to the lawful and orderly process of citizens electing their representatives.
But the SAVE Act would require people who are registering to vote (or even just updating their registration) to super-duper, extra-specially prove their citizenship. Again, if you have an official ID of the types listed above, your citizenship status has already been checked, cross-referenced and certified across a wide array of government databases.
You will be required to produce one of the following documents when you register to vote or update your voter registration:
Birth certificate
Do you know where your birth certificate is, right offhand? I don’t, and I just spent 10-15 minutes figuring out how I might order a copy online. The first site I found, US Vital Records, charges $125 for a copy of a birth certificate. The cheapest option I found was $33 and the copy would arrive in 8-10 weeks. Also, if you weren’t born in a hospital, you might not even have a birth certificate on record.
AND! If you were born Mary Smith but then married John Jones and became Mary Jones, now your birth certificate doesn’t match what’s on your driver’s license! Good luck out there. Not even to mention the hoops that trans would-be voters will have to jump through.
U.S. Passport
Um, you’ll need a birth certificate to get one… You will also need a specific type of photograph, you’ll have to apply at an official acceptance facility, you’ll pay $130, and the passport will take 4-6 weeks to arrive at your house.
Consular Report of Birth Abroad
If you were born to American parents but overseas, you better hope they thought to get one of these!
Certificate of Citizenship
If your parents didn’t get a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, or if you were adopted outside of the U.S. to American parents, you will need one of these. The online instructions were so complicated that I quit at “Preparing for Your Biometric Services Appointment.”
Naturalization Certificate
Of all of these documents, I bet that this one would be most readily to hand; surely anyone who had gone to the enormous trouble of becoming a naturalized citizen (which, depending on your circumstances, can take from a couple years to effectively never) would hold tight to this piece of paper. If it was lost in a fire or flood, though (or taken from you by an ICE agent…), you “simply” fill out Form N-565 and pay the fee…which is $555.
It is also not clear what sort of training or preparation there will be for election officials across the country who will suddenly be expected to take on an extra layer of verification and to inspect a variety of these documents for authenticity, especially since Republicans are trying to ram the SAVE Act through in time to disrupt the 2026 midterms.
And it must be said again: “Noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. It has been illegal in U.S. federal elections for more than a century and is a crime that can lead to fines, imprisonment and deportation.”
Experts say that likely-Democratic voters (AND women AND trans people) would be disproportionately affected by the SAVE Act. But what’s also so crazy (or, you know, ONE of the crazy things about all this) is that surely aspiring Republican voters will be disenfranchised by this process as well. Thom Hartmann says in his article “Is ‘Voter Fraud’ the Most Dangerous Political Lie in American History?” that Republicans know that “the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti-voter-fraud registration requirements.” Is it possible they don’t want anyone but rich white men to vote?
Is it possible they don’t want anyone to vote at all?
Additional reading:
TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won. by Greg Palast
The GOP Taliban to Women: Shut Up, Sit Down, and Stay Home on Election Days by Thom Hartmann
Tell Congress to oppose the SAVE Act Suite of bills from the League of Women Voters
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