The Only Thing the S.A.V.E. Act Would Save is More Republican Victories
It's a new scheme in a long line of vote suppression efforts compliments of the political party whose sole winning strategy for the past four decades has been making it harder to vote.
84% of women change their last names to their husbands’ when they get married. Most just start using their new surnames, maybe changing their drivers’ licenses, using them on official documents; some go so far as to get new Social Security cards but many do not. Very few, though, if any, go through the trouble of getting their birth certificates updated with their new names.
Why would they? The name on a birth certificate is the name with which one was born. The name one adopts through marriage or changing legally is the name of that person at a particular stage in his/her/their life. 69 million women and one million men do not have birth certificates matching their present names.
No big deal, right?
Well, congressional republicans think it is, and they want to make sure that women--and men — who do not go through the trouble of obtaining new birth certificates reflecting their married names are stripped of their right to vote.
It’s a new scheme in a long line of vote suppression efforts compliments of the political party whose sole winning strategy for the past four decades has been making it harder to engage with the most fundamental democratic act our country practices.
In July, House republicans passed the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Eligibility Act). If passed through the Senate and signed into law, it would require state boards of elections to ascertain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship.
What’s so wrong with that?
According to the legislation, the president of the United States — and only the president of the United States — would be in charge of enforcing it, stripping authority from the states that constitutionally are responsible for their own voter registration processes. A president who decides certain voters’ registrations are “problematic” would demand registrations be “cured”, and state authorities would have no say in it.
Lest a potential voter be subjected to this arbitrary “curing,” the SAVE Act would require a passport or other proof of citizenship. In the event someone is unable to produce one of these (like the 146 million Americans without valid passports), he or she would be required to produce both an official birth certificate with the issuing state’s seal (no copies) and a current form of identification.
And both must contain the exact same name.
If the birth certificate contains a maiden name but the person’s driver’s license has his or her married name, that person’s opportunity to vote would be eliminated.
That would include about 90% of women without passports or other proof matching their birth certificates or proof of legal name change.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) explained:
Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.
That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.
As NPR reported:
About 1 in 10 adult citizens, or 21.3 million eligible voters, say they either do not have or could not quickly find in order to show the next day their U.S. birth certificate, passport, naturalization certificate or certificate of citizenship, according to results released Tuesday from a national survey.
It’s not about voter integrity.
As the Brennan Center for Justice explained, the insidious intent is to further hamper opportunities to vote.
The bill would functionally eliminate mail registration by requiring voters registering by mail to produce citizenship documents “in person” to an election official before the registration deadline. It would also abolish many or all voter registration drives and online voter registration systems, which are typically treated like mail registration. (Moreover, the bill does not contemplate copies or electronic records of citizenship documents.) And it would severely hamper automatic voter registration, as many of those transactions don’t occur in person while someone has citizenship documents with them.
Like many republican-led efforts to squash democracy, the SAVE Act would, ironically, negatively impact more republican voters than Democratic ones since republicans are less likely to have passports, and republican-leaning women are doubly likely to have changed their surnames.
As the Center for American Progress delineates:
High rates of passport ownership are overwhelmingly concentrated in blue states, while low rates are concentrated in red states.
In seven states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport: West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
Only in four states do more than two-thirds of citizens have a valid passport: New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey.
It is already illegal for non-citizens to register to vote, contrary to hysteria on the right about “Democrats encouraging migrants into the country to vote for Democrats”.
Everyone who registers to vote is required to sign an affidavit attesting to citizenship. Those who violate that statute face severe fines, imprisonment, or deportation. Non-citizens who attempt to register to vote can also lose the opportunity to obtain U.S. citizenship.
Director of voting and elections for Common Cause, Sylvia Albert, argued:
Anybody who is on a green card or attempting to get citizenship in America, they are not trying to be arrested or to be tossed out of the country.
Reporting for NPR, Jude Joffe-Block wrote:
Election officials regularly verify voter registration information and remove ineligible voters from voter rolls. Some states verify citizenship by cross-checking voter information with other databases, such as state motor vehicle data or the federal SAVE database. Election officials must be careful not to mistakenly remove eligible voters from voter rolls, since some databases may be outdated and may not show if an immigrant has become a naturalized citizen. Such errors resulted in large numbers of eligible citizens wrongly flagged for removal in Texas in 2019 and has repeated this year as Republican officials in a number of states have publicized new initiatives to remove possible non-citizens that have ensnared eligible U.S. citizens.
Proponents of the SAVE Act--and those generally ignorant of the registration safeguards in place — naturally trot out anecdotal “evidence” of “illegal” voting.
What they do not typically cite--probably because they are unaware of it — is the extremely few cases of illegal voter registration and/or voting are always prosecuted.
For example, six green card holders were indicted recently in Ohio for allegedly voting in past elections. A University of Michigan non-citizen student from China was criminally charged for voting illegally.
“An audit in Georgia,” wrote Jude Joffe-Block, “showed 20 suspected non-citizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters (0.00024% of the state’s list). Nine had a history of voting and all 20 were referred to law enforcement.”
More common is voter disenfranchisement.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast has made exposing his life’s work. In a recent piece titled, “Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.”, Palast explains:
If not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, [Kamala] Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
Here are key numbers:
4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in the past four years, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to block voting.
In 2023, the eighth circuit court of appeals, with jurisdiction over the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, further chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) by determining only the federal government, specifically a sitting US attorney general, not any outside entities, could sue to enforce potential VRA violations.
Section two of the VRA “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act.”
In other words, if an individual perceives he or she is being denied the opportunity to vote as delineated under the Fifteen Amendment because of “race, color, or membership in a language minority group,” he or she used to be able to take the case to court.
The Trump-appointed circuit court judges who issued the opinion, David Stras and George W. Bush-appointee Raymond Gruender, however, ruled that no longer is the case.
Why?
Like so many ills plaguing our system, it’s racism.
The Arkansas State Conference NAACP and Arkansas Public Policy Panel sued the Arkansas Board of Apportionment over discriminatory redistricting maps they allege weakened Black voters’ ability to cast ballots.
This ruling essentially renders those groups and other voting advocacy groups impotent unless the US attorney general decides to take up the cause.
Former AG Merrick Garland did not do it during the Biden administration, and there is no way in hell current Attorney General Pam Bondi serving the current regime is going to either.
What can we do?
Contact your Democratic or republican senators at 202–224–3121, and let them know the SAVE Act is no longer a secret, and you are opposed to it.