“The most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress” is how Michael Waldman, CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, describes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The former counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell wrote in the conservative National Review that “It federalizes elections in a way that Republicans have long opposed.”
Since mid-March, the Senate has been debating the SAVE Act, with President Trump insisting that the Republican majority must end the filibuster to pass it and help Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections. To recap its provisions:
The SAVE Act Demands Documentary Proof of Citizenship
The Campaign Legal Center has an excellent summary explaining how the Act works to discourage voting. The following categories are drawn from their post, “What You Need to Know About the SAVE Act.” The list is augmented with material from author Paul Loeb ‘s article linking this Act to a history of Republican voter suppression, which is provided in abbreviated form below.
Creating Documentation Hurdles
Americans are already required to verify their eligibility when voting. However, the Act imposes unnecessary barriers to the registration process, requiring voters to provide documentation proving they are U.S. citizens, such as a passport or birth certificate, which many either don’t have on hand or cannot access.
More than 21 million Americans lack ready access to these documents, and Black, Latino, and Asian citizens are three times more likely to lack them. Married people who have changed their names, as well as the young and the elderly, who are more likely to move multiple times, would have problems providing the proper documents to cast a ballot.
In addition, most voters wouldn’t be able to register to vote with their driver’s license alone because licenses generally do not indicate citizenship. Instead, they would need another, less common form of documentation, such as a U.S. passport or a birth certificate.
The SAVE Act could also impact registered voters, too. Any time somebody updates their registration, if they change their address or political party, they will need to provide these documents.
The SAVE America Act would also implement a national voter ID requirement that is more burdensome than almost every state voter ID law currently in effect. Conservatives and libertarians are noted for opposing a national identification card that every citizen must have, with the reasonable fear that it may evolve into a requirement to always carry it, which could be the first step toward an overreach by a central government tracking the movement of all citizens.
Eliminating Mail Registration and Disrupt Online Registration
In 2022, more than 7 million Americans registered to vote by mail, and almost 11 million registered online. The Act will overhaul mail registration and require online registration systems in a manner that severely threatens their continued operations to provide a safe and dependable means of voting.
It eliminates most in-person voter registration drives because election officials require original proof of citizenship and groups can’t submit it on people’s behalf.
Promoting Voter Purges
The SAVE Act mandates voter purges every 30 days. Consequently, registered voters who have previously been removed based on faulty data could be thrown off the voter rolls right before elections. The Act ignores the fact that existing laws already ensure that only citizens vote. Based on state prosecution records, votes by non-citizens account for less than 0.001 percent of all votes cast in federal elections.
Threatening Election Workers with being Jailed
Under this Act, election workers are intimidated into enforcing a needless law that restricts voting by non-citizens. The Act could send any such worker to prison for up to 5 years if they help register someone without the required documents, even if the person being registered is a citizen.
Disenfranchising some citizens from voting
The following is an excerpt from Paul Loeb’s “Link the SAVE Act to the History of American Voter Suppression.” Loeb details the historical connection between efforts to hinder voting among citizens whose interests do not align with the Republican Party’s most conservative policies and what the SAVE Act would make law:
The SAVE Act builds on voter suppression that Republicans have been carrying out for the past 25 years. The Democrats need to talk about this history because, whether this bill passes, there will be others like it to come.
The SAVE Act didn’t just emerge; it builds on a long and problematic history. In the 2000 presidential election, Florida, under Governor Jeb Bush, threw 12,000 largely African American voters off the rolls by falsely charging them with being former felons, who, under Jim Crow-era laws, were prohibited from voting. This set the stage for a Republican-appointed Supreme Court to tip the state to Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, by 537 votes. Over 960,000 Florida former felons remain without a vote, including 12% of all African American potential voters, because the governor and legislature undermined a successful 2018 initiative that was supposed to give them back their rights.
President Bush benefited from disenfranchisement again in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Kenneth Blackwell purged 300,000 largely African American voters from the rolls in cities like Cleveland and Columbus, including one in four Cleveland voters. Without them, he probably would have lost the state and therefore the Presidency. Blackwell also tried to reject thousands of registrations because they were on the wrong weight of paper and allowed each county, whatever its size, just a single early-voting station, leaving the state’s major cities with five-hour lines.
In 2013, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court overturned major sections of the Voting Rights Act that made it harder for states with histories of discrimination to limit voting rights. Immediately afterward, Southern states began passing newly restrictive laws. North Carolina, for instance, passed a new voter ID law invalidating student IDs, public employee IDs, and photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies (while allowing gun permits); shortened the early voting window; banned same day registration during early voting; and prohibited paid voter registration drives.
It also prohibited extending voting hours in the event of long lines, eliminated the right to cast a provisional ballot if you end up at the wrong precinct, and ended a highly successful high school registration program. Local election officials also began removing on-campus voting stations, relocating them sometimes miles away. A federal Appeals Court overturned much of the law, saying it had targeted African Americans with “almost surgical precision.”
Other states once deterred by the Voting Rights Act including Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama passed similar laws to limit acceptable ID. Alabama’s excluded Social Security cards, birth certificates, Medicaid or Medicare cards, and Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards. More than half a million voters were removed from Georgia’s rolls in 2017, including over 100,000 who simply hadn’t voted in recent elections or responded to a mailed notice. These laws and others similar created voting rate gaps of up to 24 points between white voters and voters of color, ones that didn’t exist before the new laws.
The rationale was to prevent voter fraud. But a five-year Bush administration crackdown convicted only eighty-six people of voter fraud nationwide, most of whom had simply made mistakes about their eligibility. The Save Act focuses on non-citizen voting, yet even Project 2025’s creator, The Heritage Foundation, found just 68 proven cases dating back to the 1980s. While the most dedicated voters will find ways to register and vote, voter suppression laws are like adding hurdles to a running track. Top athletes can still surmount them. If you’re just a bit less skilled or dedicated, you’re likely to give up, and if you place enough hurdles, you’ll knock out the majority of those targeted.
So yes, let’s warn of the SAVE Act’s specific destructive consequences. But let’s also talk about the anti-democratic history on which it builds, because this probably won’t be the last Republican attempt to deter the vote.
Bottom Line
The intent of the SAVE Act is not to secure safe voting but to eliminate voters. As Loeb concludes, the history of suppressing segments of voters is not new. And it will continue if leaders and parties abandon our democratic republic’s basic principle: to ensure fair in elections, everyone must have a fair opportunity to vote and free access to all information.
Our presidents do not control the press, but they control the largest megaphone for government messaging. If their wealthy supporters control the largest swaths of the media, they can repeatedly make blatantly false statements that undermine this principle across the nation.
The SAVE Act is the latest and most extreme example of how a national government project rests on a deliberately false narrative that Trump has repeatedly advanced. Citing a debunked 2014 study that never surveyed actual voter data, Trump claims that nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2024. This premise underlies his administration’s effort to expel millions of immigrants, using the mantra that the nation must have elections free from fraud. In fact, the Brennan Center has compiled research showing that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.
The SAVE Act serves only one purpose: to stop people who would be inclined to oppose Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ political, social, and economic policies from voting. It is the manifestation of a “Big Brother” government that knows what is best for everyone and wants to know who opposes it.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
