Two weeks after Donald Trump issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order, the House of Representatives on Thursday passed a measure, the SAVE Act, that is described by voting rights advocates as perhaps the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress. It could disenfranchise millions of voters and would severely limit how Americans can register to vote.
“If the SAVE Act were enacted, this would be the first federal voter suppression bill in recent memory, and possibly ever,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program. “It would be an unprecedented burden on tens of millions of Americans and would block millions of Americans from voting and participating in our democracy. It’s a five-alarm fire for American voters and for election officials.”
Under the alleged need of stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal and exceedingly rare, it would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. The bill passed the House Thursday morning 220-208.
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.
“It would be an unprecedented burden on tens of millions of Americans and would block millions of Americans from voting and participating in our democracy.”
But the number of impacted voters is much larger than just those who don’t possess or have easy access to citizenship documents. According to the Pew Research Center, 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name and could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill. Interestingly enough, conservative Republican women and Republican/Republican-leaning women were the two groups most likely to take their partner’s name. Greta Bedekovics, associate director for democratic policy at the Center for American Progress, calls this “a marriage penalty” that “completely ignores the implications of the 19th Amendment.”
And the bill goes much further than simply requiring proof of citizenship to vote. It would upend voter registration in the US because of a requirement that voters provide this documentation in person, at an election office. According to voting rights experts, that requirement would end online registration, mail registration, and voter registration drives, methods that accounted for 1 in 3 registrations during the 2018-2022 election cycles. This requirement would apply not just for new registrants, but every time someone updates their registration. Roughly 80 million people register or re-register every election cycle and less than 6 percent registered at an election office.
“The SAVE Act will take us back to a pre-Internet era of registration,” says Bedekovics. “Americans hate going to the DMV, so imagine having to go in person to your election office every single time you will make these changes.”
Though touted by Republicans, this provision of the bill could also most harm some GOP-leaning constituencies. A CAP study of the 30 largest counties in the US by area, which encompass eight Western states, found that voters “would be forced to drive, on average across the counties, four-and-a-half hours round trip and cover approximately 260 miles to reach their election office.” Some voters might have to drive as far as eight hours to register to vote.
“That’s not people that you generally think would be ensnared by this bill, but it is going to be a lot of rural, oftentimes conservative voters, who have to get in their car and pay as much as $75 in gas money and cross into two different states just to be able to be able to show their documentation to an election official,” Bedekovics says.
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,” says Sweren-Becker. “So it is really an election administration nightmare.”
The measure fuses two of the central planks of the MAGA agenda—anti-immigrant hysteria and voter fraud paranoia. Republicans claim the bill is necessary to stop non-citizens from registering, but they can’t find any evidence of that occurring. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at a press conference last year. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
In reality, such instances are minuscule in number. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible non-citizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed 42 jurisdictions, home to 23 million people, including 8 of the 10 areas with the highest populations of noncitizens, and found just 30 instances of a suspected noncitizen voting, equal to 0.0001 percent of total votes
“The claim that illegal voting is swaying American elections is nothing if not sensational,” writes Walter Olson, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Those who levy sensational charges should bear the burden of proving them. But they haven’t. It’s just assertion after assertion, with no refutation of the considerable evidence to the contrary.”
But recent history shows the burdens of proof of citizenship laws are all-too-real. “We don’t have to imagine how this would play out because we’ve seen states conduct similar experiments,” says Bedekovics.
When Kansas passed a proof of citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 new registrants, more than 31,000 people, from registering. Nearly half were under 30. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who saw the law as a model for the nation, claimed noncitizen voting was “pervasive” but identified only seven convictions for such acts in Kansas over a 13 year period. A federal court struck down the law in 2018; the alleged cases of voter fraud Kobach presented before the court, which he called “the tip of the iceberg,” was “only an icicle,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Kobach’s replacement, Republicans Secretary of State Scott Schwab, told the Associated Press. “It didn’t work out so well.”
New Hampshire passed a similar law last year, which went into effect for local elections in March. One voter, 70-year-old Betsy Spencer of Hopkinton, had to make three trips to the polls in order to cast a ballot. “I had my birth certificate, a change of address from the US Postal Service—everything but my blood type and the kitchen sink—and I was told I could not register to vote,” Spencer told New Hampshire Public Radio.
Like 69 million other American women, Spencer’s last name on her birth certificate was different than the one she used to register to vote, so she had to keep going back to grab more documents. “When I divorced, I kept my last name for consistency with my family,” Spencer said. “The idea that women have to prove their name change is profoundly sexist and limiting.”
The SAVE Act died after passing the House last summer, with President Biden and Senate Democrats in opposition, but Republicans resurrected it after Trump won—with the president incorporating some of its provisions into his new executive order. Democrats are hopeful they can defeat it once again in the Senate, where the measure needs 60 votes to pass.
Over the last sixty years years, Congress has steadily expanded voting rights, from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. “What Congress has mostly been doing over the last 60 years is responding to state efforts at voter suppression and trying to make voting more accessible,” says Sweren-Becker. “If Congress were to enact the SAVE Act, it would be a an enormous departure from that mission of protecting the freedom to vote.”
This article has been updated to reflect the bill’s passage in the House.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.