The SAVE Act is making its way through Congress with President Donald Trump’s support. So, what’s the big deal?
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility [SAVE] Act, sometimes called the SAVE America Act with a flair of melodrama, has a clearly stated purpose [if you believe it]. Namely, to tighten election security, so that people who are not eligible to vote do not impact our elections by voting anyway. The specific [if mythical] threat: non-citizens.
This ghastly bill rides the anti-immigrant cultural wave that this administration has been fomenting. Its provisions bolster Trump’s “big lie” that our elections are “rigged” and “stolen” – but only the ones he loses: talkin’ to you, 2020.
Trump has said aloud that if the GOP loses its majority in Congress, he’ll be impeached again. He’s probably right, having well earned a historic, third Congressional indictment. With his approval numbers tanking and the historical pattern of the majority party losing seats in midterm elections, Trump has found in the SAVE Act a source of sleazy hope. If you can keep enough voters from the polls, the GOP may barely hold their itty-bitty majority, thereby minimizing the odds of impeachment for his numerous crimes and misdemeanors.
Perhaps it should be called the SAVE Trump Act.
Oklahoma’s Republican U.S. Sen. James Lankford, ever-eager to do Trump’s bidding, calls the SAVE Act “common sense.” State Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Gentner Drummond also supports it [along with anything else associated with Trump, as he feverishly courts Oklahoma’s MAGA voters]. Many others – including this writer and likely most Observer readers – are expressing vehement opposition.
As infamously divided and polarized as our political spectrum is these days, both [or all] sides do share common ground. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that non-citizens should be illegally participating in our elections.
Reality check: They don’t.
Even the far rightwing Heritage Foundation, in reviewing national elections since 2000, was able to turn up only a miniscule number of non-citizen voters – nowhere close to even 1% of the total number of votes counted – to the point of having zero effect on the outcome. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, of the voters Heritage Foundation identified as fraudulent, “only a handful” were non-citizens, “a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide … The Heritage Foundation’s database undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud.”
The American Immigration Council, based in DC, recommends that the issue likely is the result of confusion among non-citizens about whether or not they can vote. One of the AIC’s senior fellows wrote, “The lessons to take from Heritage’s own database are that noncitizen voting is not a serious problem and that to the extent rare cases occur, they would be best addressed by better training government workers to recognize immigration documents and follow procedure.”
The safeguards against noncitizen voting which are already in place have been working. Even the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services [USCIS] has acknowledged this in writing: “The evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended – it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”
In other words, in the SAVE Act, we have yet another solution in search of a problem – launching its own set of antidemocratic problems. Millions of eligible voters could be blocked from voting in the upcoming midterms and other future elections. Kind of a big deal.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE? SPECIFIC PROBLEMS WITH THE SAVE ACT
SAVE Act supporters misrepresent it, minimizing the impact it would have and mock its critics for overreacting. Omitting the barriers it calls for, they frame it as a benign requirement for voter IDs to enhance election security. They try to normalize this as something that most states already require.
There is so, so much more to it than that. As usual, to pull out another cliche, the devil is in the details.
Admire or despise him, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, clearly spelled out those bedeviled details in a March 23, 2025 New York Times op-ed that begins:
“The Republican effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections is neither theoretical nor exaggerated. A coordinated, multifaceted campaign is underway – including the attempt to pass the SAVE America Act, which narrowly passed the House last month and which the Senate started debating last week.
Schumer goes on to explain how, despite GOP talking points, this is not merely a “voter ID bill.” It is a bill which includes several effective obstacles to voter registration – including re-registration of already registered voters who need to update their information, including name changes to comply with the voter ID component of the bill. It’s carefully crafted, Schumer argues, “to systematically disenfranchise Americans” – not individuals who are already not allowed to vote.
A few of the ways it does this, summarizing Schumer, are:
– Requiring states, which constitutionally have the authority to manage elections, to turn over its voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, giving Washington “control over voter eligibility.”
Schumer reminds us of recently fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s declaration that “we have the right people voting.” These “right people” would be identified by “an algorithm that would ostensibly root out noncitizens,” Schumer writes, describing it as “a program … which has already proved dangerously unreliable.”
Trial runs in Missouri and Texas were a disaster: “more than half of the voters flagged as ineligible were, in fact, eligible American citizens” in Boone County, MO. There were similar problems in Texas, where “county clerks … also found many examples of wrongly identified voters. Citizens were removed from the voter rolls anyway.”
– Voters removed from the rolls may not find out about it until they show up at their polling places. “The bill imposes no requirement that voters be notified if they are purged.” Schumer predicts “pandemonium” as poll workers inform hundreds of thousands of qualified voters they’ve been flagged as ineligible and try to turn them away.
– Voter ID requirements would come into play in a new and complicated way, “not as a safeguard against fraud,” Schumer writes, “but as another barrier to voting.”
Much has been said about the plight of voters whose names on birth certificates don’t match their current identification cards, a new requirement for registering, or who are among the half of American citizens who do not possess a passport, which costs over $150 and takes several weeks to secure. Schumer also points out another consequence: “For those who had been wrongfully purged from voter rolls, the SAVE Act would make registering again a bureaucratic nightmare … Some 20 million American citizens lack the required documents to prove citizenship” as the SAVE Act requires for registering to vote.
– Unbelievably [or maybe not, under our current regime], the SAVE Act would also allow voter registration to take place only at government election offices, and only in person. “Mail-in registration? Gone. Registering at churches and college campuses? Illegal. Registering when you get your driver’s license or sign up for Social Security? No more.”
So, what’s the big deal, other than a little inconvenience?
Here’s the bottom line, which Schumer articulates well:
“The burdens of the SAVE Act would fall most heavily on the socioeconomically disadvantaged, the working class and voters of color. They would fall on Americans who cannot spend hours navigating bureaucratic obstacles, on older people who depend on voting by mail, on those without passports, on rural communities far from election offices. in other words: millions of everyday Americans.”
ACTION ITEMS
- Read and widely circulate Schumer’s op-ed piece and/or this column. Raise awareness so everyone you know can articulate a clear answer to the question of “What’s the big deal?”
- Contact your U.S. Senators’ offices – even the Republican ones, like Oklahoma’s Lankford and Alan Armstrong, newly appointed by Gov. Kevin Stitt to fill Markwayne Mullin’s vacated seat. Be clear and specific about why you want them to vote against the SAVE Act. Appeal to their patriotism. Disarm their “common sense” talking points by paraphrasing Schumer’s four bullet points [see above].
The SAVE Act is an audacious attempt to undermine our elections, a key mechanism of this democratic republic. This isn’t just libs clutching their pearls. It is a true threat to our representative democracy. Stopping it is a very big deal.
