The U.S House of Representatives voted last week to pass the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require all voters to show proof of their citizenship at the polls. Political organizers say that move could potentially disenfranchise millions of Black and Brown voters, married women, youth, seniors, rural voters, and transgender voters if it becomes law.
This bill at its core would require voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and photo identification that proves citizenship to vote in federal elections — even though only U.S. citizens can legally register and vote, with an existing penalty for fraud already in place.
“The SAVE America Act is not about protecting our elections — it’s about disguising voter suppression techniques aimed at disenfranchising Black voters as election security,” said Legal Defense Fund Director of Policy Demetria McCain in a statement. “It is disingenuous, it is discriminatory, and it is all based on a continuously disproven narrative of voter fraud propagated by an administration concerned not with voter protections but solely with the fear of letting people select their own leaders.”
The concept of a voter ID bill is hardly new in this country’s history. The 24th Amendment was specifically added to the U.S. Constitution to eliminate poll taxes in 1964. Before that, poll taxes were imposed on Black voters by white supremacists angry about the passage of the 15th Amendment, which banned voting discrimination based on race. They used literacy tests, poll taxes, arbitrary voter ID rules, violence, unwarranted arrests, and intimidation to disqualify Black voters at the polls. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) was a landmark federal law designed to enforce the 15th and 24th Amendments.
Right-wing lawmakers have made this an ongoing battle in Congress for the past two years, in the background of President Donald Trump’s violent deportation agenda. The House passed a similar version of the voter ID bill last year, but massive public backlash blocked it from going further in the Senate. The bill is consistent with Trump’s executive order that blithely attempted to require proof of citizenship to vote but was blocked by a federal judge.
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote,” Trump said to conservative Christian voters at a 2024 Florida event.
Gréta Bedekovics, director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress, said that House Republicans have leveraged the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill to try to “trade” a vote on the voter ID bill with the Senate, meaning that Congress may have to make a decision in the next few weeks. Bedekovics said the SAVE America Act “is not grounded in reality” and is “obviously a tactic” to sow chaos in elections before the midterms.
As of last year, about 21 million U.S. citizens do not have immediate access to a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Around 34.5 million people don’t have a driver’s license or state ID. Bedekovics said it is costly and time-consuming for the average person with a 9–5 job to acquire an original document, such as a REAL ID, birth certificate, or passport.
The voter ID bill would make voters who use absentee and/or mail-in ballots submit a copy of their ID with both the request for, and submission of, their ballot. This would functionally get rid of online and mail-in voter registration. According to 2024 U.S. Election Assistance Commission survey, only 6% of voters currently register in person at an election office.
Bedekovics added that this would have a disproportionate impact on young adults and students since the bill would ban college IDs as valid to register with, and would require that anybody registering to vote for the first time or making an update to registration to physically go to an election office and show their documents.
Republicans in rural areas of the country, who largely use mail-in ballots, and married women would also likely be disenfranchised by the voter ID bill. Bedekovics said states have tried to experiment with these laws before. Kansas, for example, passed a state version of this in around 2011 that was struck down by the courts because it blocked 32,000 eligible citizens from registering to vote. New Hampshire is currently embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), New Hampshire Youth Movement, and the League of Women Voters over a proof of citizenship state voter law that allegedly blocked women with changed surnames from voting.
“On the whole, across the country, in red states, people are far less likely to own passports, and conservative married women are far more likely to change their last name than liberal and progressive women,” said Bedekovics. “They would have the biggest problem with having a matching birth certificate that matches their married legal name.”
The act would also force states to remove “noncitizens,” or those who are suspected to be, from their official lists of eligible voters and submit their sensitive voter information to the DHS database. Bedekovics said that the Trump administration is “trying to make America a ‘show your papers’ country.”
New York City tried to give “legally documented” voting-age noncitizens, living and working in the city, the right to vote in local city elections in 2021. They wouldn’t have been allowed to vote for any federal or state office. The bill was passed in the City Council and briefly became law under Mayor Eric Adams in 2022, but was later struck down by a state judge.
“The SAVE American Act is based on the false claim that there is widespread voter fraud in the nation,” said Jana Bergere, program coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), in a statement. “Report after report [has] shown that is simply not true. In fact, leading experts have argued that the nation’s elections are secure. Requiring voters to jump through verification ‘hoops’ does nothing more than deter citizens from voting during a time when increased voter turnout should be encouraged.”
If a person really wants to vote and meets all the necessary requirements, they’ll find a way to get to the polls and pay the fees for their IDs. Not sure why liberals are fighting this because it sounds like it harms the conservative voters more. Ah, now I remember, because it’s Trump, they would disagree with him on anything, no matter if he’s right.