The SAVE Act is being touted as a way to prevent noncitizens from voting. Donald Trump, without any evidence whatsoever, repeatedly blamed illegal voting for losing the popular vote in 2016. The Brennan Center for Justice performed an analysis and confirmed what we already knew: “In the jurisdictions we studied, very few noncitizens voted in the 2016 election. Across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.”
Noncitizens voting is already illegal under penalty of perjury, so what does the SAVE Act hope to accomplish? The Center for American Progress provides us with a few facts:
- The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would require all American citizens registering to vote or updating their registration information to present documentary proof of citizenship in person. For the vast majority of Americans, this would be a passport or birth certificate.
- Approximately 146 million American citizens do not possess a valid passport – for context, 153 million Americans voted in the 2024 presidential general election
- 84 percent of women who marry change their surname, meaning as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate with their legal name on it and thereby could not use their birth certificate to prove citizenship.
- Only 1 in 4 Americans with a high school degree or less have a valid passport.
- Only 1 in 5 Americans with income below $50,000 have a valid passport.
The SAVE Act also says that it “specifies what documents are considered acceptable proof of U.S. citizenship, such as identification that complies with the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates U.S. citizenship.” However, the Center for American Progress also points out “Government-issued driver’s licenses – including REAL IDs – as well as military or tribal IDs do not satisfy the bill’s requirements.”
To sum up, this fascist wants to keep women, trans people, and poor people from voting. Are we going to let him?
Photo from The New York Times
