The SAVE Act makes voting harder without a proven threat - The Michigan Daily

College students don’t usually think about election law until they try to register to vote away from home and discover that voting eligibility is not the hard part — paperwork is. A dorm address that doesn’t match a driver’s license, a birth certificate sitting in a parent’s filing cabinet three states away, a name that doesn’t line up across documents yet; none of it makes you technically ineligible. But it can still leave you unable to register.

On Feb. 11, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, 218–213. The bill would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register for federal elections and would add new photo identification requirements for federal voting, including mail-in ballots.

Federal voting law has often moved in the opposite direction: lowering barriers, not raising them. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 established federal oversight to protect equal access to registration and voting by removing discriminatory obstacles — treating participation as a baseline, not a privilege. The SAVE Act points the other way by federalizing new front-end documentation hurdles in the name of an unsubstantiated threat. Calling the SAVE Act a “safeguard” isn’t sufficient; its justification must be earned.

The bill’s sponsor, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, has defended it as necessary to protect election integrity and ensure that only citizens participate in federal elections — a framing that casts the measure as a form of “democratic self-defense”, but I’m not willing to treat that phrase as self-justifying. It has to signify something specific, meaning a voting restriction should count as self-defense only if it is threat-based, necessary and proportionate. The SAVE Act isn’t, because it doesn’t address a demonstrated, widespread threat, and it will inevitably make voting harder for eligible citizens.

The claim that the SAVE Act responds to an existing threat is erroneous. Citizenship is already a legal requirement for voting in federal elections, registration already relies on an eligibility attestation made under penalty of perjury and states run ongoing list-maintenance checks to keep voter rolls accurate.

Democracies should aim to prevent ineligible voting, but it’s important to assess whether we’re addressing a proven, large-scale procedural harm. Even though politicians often elevate noncitizen voting as a central threat, reports and election officials have repeatedly described it as extremely rare. Requiring every eligible voter to prove citizenship on demand only complicates it by redesigning political participation around a low-incidence risk.

The SAVE Act’s necessity is also an unfounded claim. A serious restriction such as this one must show why less burdensome tools can’t protect the same democratic good. A less burdensome approach would focus on election administration — funding local offices, improving backend verification, conducting targeted audits and clarifying interagency data access — rather than adding new front-end documentation demands for individual voters. Election officials and expert analysts have urged lawmakers to prioritize backend verification systems and improve administrative processes, not create new barriers for voters.

The SAVE Act’s framework shifts verification costs from institutions — who can verify in bulk, with standardized processes — onto individuals, who have to locate, replace or reconcile documents under time restrictions. For many applicants, this would involve presenting documentary proof to the appropriate election office by the state’s registration deadline. It’s a new chokepoint, proving much more inconvenient with little to no demonstrated benefit.

Consider proportionality: Even if a safeguard aims at something real, it must be sufficiently tailored so it doesn’t predictably cut eligible citizens off from the franchise. The scale of collateral burden here is not speculative. The Brennan Center estimates that 21.3 million voting-age U.S. citizens — more than 9% — do not have proof-of-citizenship documents readily available, and some don’t have them at all. Many could obtain them eventually, but “eventually” doesn’t help when the deadline is next week and the records in question are three states away.

Proof-of-citizenship rules prove time and time again to be detrimental in practice. Kansas enacted a proof-of-citizenship requirement in 2013 that suspended more than 30,000 voter registrations before federal courts struck it down in 2020, a decision later upheld on appeal. Kansas serves as a cautionary tale that supporters of the SAVE Act often overlook: it will not stop widespread fraud but will instead complicate access for many.

The burden will be especially visible on college campuses, where students’ addresses and IDs fall out of sync and key documents often sit at home. In practice, the rule makes participation hinge on paperwork alignment rather than eligibility.

In support of the SAVE Act, House Administration Chair Bryan Steil called requiring proof of citizenship and voter ID “common sense” and argued that the reforms would restore Americans’ faith in our elections. From his perspective, the point is to enhance public confidence by making eligibility visible, uniform and harder to contest.

However, confidence in voting procedures can’t be built by using barriers as a substitute for evidence. When distrust comes from claims that don’t stand up to evidence, rebuilding confidence by adding obstacles isn’t reform — it’s allowing the loudest suspicion to rewrite the rules of voting. Courts dismissed or rejected many allegations of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 presidential election. With this in mind, redesigning participation rules to accommodate unfounded suspicion risks turning misinformation into a governing principle.

This is the key point that should concern us, even if the SAVE Act fails in the Senate. When leaders can’t prove a claim of widespread fraud, but institutions change access rules to quell suspicion, distrust stops being a problem democracy manages and becomes a foundational principle that guides it.

The Senate should vote against the SAVE Act. And citizens should notice the precedent it sets, even before that vote: The House has now voted in support of raising the price of voting participation for millions of eligible citizens.

Having ballots count only if your paperwork survives the trip is not democratic self-defense; it is democratic burden-shifting. A democracy protects itself by preserving equal standing in participation, not by hardening access in response to unproven threats.

Alexander Voorhees is an Opinion Columnist who explores how national politics and institutions shape campus life and democratic legitimacy in his column “On Public Life.” He can be reached at *[email protected]*.