The SAVE America Act Threatens Millions With Voter Suppression Worse Than Before

Republicans in Congress are pushing the SAVE America Act, a harsher version of last year’s SAVE Act, that would slam the door on millions of eligible voters under the guise of preventing voter fraud. The truth is clear: voter fraud is vanishingly rare, with a Heritage Foundation study finding a fraud rate of just 0.00000764 percent over 24 years nationwide. Yet this law aims to impose draconian proof-of-citizenship rules that would disenfranchise vast swaths of the population.

Under the SAVE America Act, voters must present proof of citizenship in person at elections offices—often a single location per county—every time they register, update their address, or vote. This is a massive barrier for rural residents, the elderly, disabled people, and anyone lacking reliable transportation. Common IDs like driver’s licenses, military IDs, and tribal IDs mostly won’t qualify unless they include specific birth information. Birth certificates only work if they perfectly match current legal names, which is a problem for millions who have changed names due to marriage, divorce, or adoption.

Nearly half of Americans don’t have passports, and in several states fewer than one third do, making passport requirements a nonstarter. The law also mandates states submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security’s error-prone “citizen verification program,” which has a documented track record of misidentifying citizens as non-citizens. An audit in North Carolina found over 97 percent of flagged voters were actually citizens, and the national database mislabels 75 percent of naturalized citizens as non-citizens. This bureaucratic nightmare risks purging legitimate voters without their knowledge.

Kansas tried a similar law in 2013, which blocked 31,000 eligible voters before being struck down as unconstitutional in 2018. Even Republican officials like Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab warn against replicating that failure. Yet GOP leaders openly admit these laws are about winning elections by suppressing votes. Senator Lindsey Graham bluntly told Fox News in 2020 that without cracking down on voting access Republicans would lose power. Trump himself called the legislation “guarantee[ing] the midterms” for Republicans.

This is not about election integrity. It is about weaponizing fear and falsehoods to rig the system against voters. It echoes the chilling “papers please” mentality from authoritarian regimes, threatening the fundamental right to vote in America. We must recognize the SAVE America Act for what it is: a direct attack on democracy disguised as a solution to a problem that barely exists.