The House of Representatives passed the Orwellian “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” (SAVE Act) on Thursday. It purports to protect our democracy from the non-existent problem of non-citizen voting. What the bill really does, by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, is create what Mother Jones’ Ari Berman calls a “five-alarm fire” for legit American voters and for election officials:
Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups. Sixty percent of them voted in the 2020 election. Close to 4 million don’t have these documents at all because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.
But the number of affected voters is much larger than just those who don’t possess or have easy access to citizenship documents. According to the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of American women married to men have taken their spouse’s last name; that equates to about 69 million women who do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name and could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill.
…
The bill would create criminal penalties for election officials who register any noncitizens, even if they did so by mistake, while also forcing them to handle the burden of helping all the voters who have to show new citizenship documentation at election offices. It would also mandate frequent purging of voter rolls based on citizenship records, which frequently ensnares lawful voters based on faulty data, and allows voters to be removed from the rolls right before an election, in violation of the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day “quiet period.” And the bill would go into effect immediately, with no funding attached.
“It’s a completely unfunded mandate that would place an enormous burden on state and local election officials at the same time as it also places them in jeopardy of civil and criminal penalties,” [Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program] says. “So it is really an election administration nightmare.”
The bill also gives false credence to some of MAGA’s propaganda that elections can’t be trusted, that immigrants are endangering the country and that “there is a deliberate effort underway to flood the country with immigrants who will vote Democratic,” as Philip Bump put it in a Washington Post column last year. He accurately called it the white supremacists’ “’great replacement’ theory, now in legislation form.”
Berman points out that some Republicans could be among the most harmed by the bill’s requirements. That's because a) Republican women are more likely to take their partner’s name than other voting groups and b) it will be more time-consuming and expensive for rural, often conservative, voters to drive to the office of an election official in order to show their documentation.
Yet all voting House Republicans, plus four Democrats, voted for the bill.
The bill now goes to the Senate where Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, is a cosponsor.
