What the SAVE Act is not

As the SAVE Act strug­gles to find trac­tion in the Senate, many Americans are con­fused as to what the act tru­ly says and what its pur­pose is. In this series, new guest con­trib­u­tor Crystal Brantly will explore what the SAVE Act is NOT and what the SAVE Act IS.

The SAVE Act is being tout­ed as a sim­ple man­date to show pho­to ID to vote. The require­ment to pro­vide vot­er ID is pop­u­lar with Americans of both par­ties — gar­ner­ing the sup­port of 83% of Americans. However, near­ly half of all states already require a pho­to ID to vote (includ­ing Kentucky). 

Another 12 states require some form of non-pho­to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (i.e., birth cer­tifi­cate, hunt­ing license, bank state­ment, Medicare/Medicaid card). The remain­ing 14 states don’t require vot­er ID on elec­tion day, but they do use oth­er ways of ver­i­fy­ing iden­ti­ty, includ­ing sig­na­ture match­ing, ver­i­fy­ing per­son­al infor­ma­tion, or sign­ing an affi­davit. In addi­tion, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that each state require proof of iden­ti­ty when a res­i­dent reg­is­ters to vote or votes for the first time (even by mail). 

These mea­sures are used to pre­vent fraud­u­lent vot­ing by both cit­i­zens and nonci­t­i­zens, though research has shown that these are exceed­ing­ly rare. 

After the 2016 elec­tion, Trump’s claims that he would have won the pop­u­lar vote if it weren’t for mil­lions of “ille­gals” vot­ing sparked a fear that nonci­t­i­zens were vot­ing in record num­bers. Trump’s loss in 2020 and the result­ing claims of vot­ing fraud fueled the belief that a law such as the SAVE Act is nec­es­sary to keep nonci­t­i­zens from voting. 

Despite the numer­ous stud­ies debunk­ing this claim, many Americans are con­cerned that nonci­t­i­zens are ille­gal­ly cast­ing votes in elec­tions to a degree that would change the result of a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. However, the Heritage Foundation (an ultra-right-wing think tank) has com­piled a list of cas­es involv­ing elec­tion fraud over the last four decades, and accord­ing to an analy­sis of their data­base, there are only 68 cas­es of nonci­t­i­zens vot­ing, and only 10 of those involve undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. This amounts to few­er than one in three mil­lion peo­ple over four decades. For ref­er­ence, your chances of get­ting struck by light­ning in any giv­en year are about one in one mil­lion. According to those odds, there are three times as many peo­ple struck by light­ning in any giv­en year as there are cas­es of nonci­t­i­zens vot­ing in the past four decades. 

Not only are the cas­es of nonci­t­i­zens vot­ing out­ra­geous­ly small, but in many cas­es, when nonci­t­i­zens reg­is­tered or attempt­ed to vote, it was not due to mal­ice or decep­tion, but rather a belief that they were legal­ly allowed to vote due to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of laws or mis­in­for­ma­tion by officials. 

Regardless, if the goal is to pass more laws to keep nonci­t­i­zens from vot­ing, there is already a law on the books that pre­vents nonci­t­i­zens from vot­ing in fed­er­al elec­tions (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996) and, as pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed, the HAVA requires states to ver­i­fy iden­ti­ty and cit­i­zen­ship upon reg­is­tra­tion or first-time voting. 

In addi­tion to the lack of evi­dence of nonci­t­i­zen vot­ing, there is anoth­er issue at play: laws that aim to pro­mote elec­tion integri­ty by restrict­ing the right to vote often have the oppo­site result. 

In 2011, Kansas pur­port­ed that because an audit found 39 nonci­t­i­zens on state vot­er rolls over a peri­od of 15 years, a law requir­ing proof of cit­i­zen­ship to reg­is­ter (a birth cer­tifi­cate or pass­port) was need­ed. The law was in effect for three years. During that time, 30,000 Kansans were pro­hib­it­ed from vot­ing. Ultimately, the law was found to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, and the state had to pay huge admin­is­tra­tive costs and court fees in excess of two mil­lion dol­lars. Under the ban­ner of “elec­tion integri­ty,” the integri­ty of the votes of the cit­i­zens of Kansas was actu­al­ly compromised. 

So if the SAVE Act is not sim­ply a bill to require ver­i­fi­ca­tion of vot­er iden­ti­ty or keep nonci­t­i­zens from vot­ing (both of which are already cov­ered in both state and fed­er­al laws), what is it? 

Check out the next sto­ry in this series next week to learn what the SAVE Act actu­al­ly is.