Washington, D.C. — Congress is expected to vote this week on the dangerous Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act which the MAGA regime introduced earlier this year. The Act, which previously passed the House last July, requires voters to show matching birth certificates and passports to prove citizenship to register to vote. Republicans claim that this act will help prevent non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal.
This dangerous voter suppression measure would also eliminate online and by-mail voter registration options, disenfranchising millions of voters who lack the time or access to reach in-person voting sites—predominantly citizens of marginalized groups and the working class.
Voter ID requirements in the SAVE act are so stringent that individuals who have changed their names legally may be scrubbed from voter rolls across the country, forcing them to prove their own identity to elections officials in-person. This will further disenfranchise the queer and transgender community while also threatening the voting rights of married women who have changed their last name.
The SAVE Act would prevent an estimated 21 million Americans from exercising their constitutional right to participate in our democracy. If passed, this act will only harm our most vulnerable citizens, disproportionately affecting lower-income voters and voters of color.
Non-citizen voting has been a Republican rallying cry since the 2016 election, yet studies have yet to find substantial evidence to support these claims. Still, the MAGA movement is determined to root out this non-existent issue.
Proponents of the SAVE Act want to take us back to a time of literacy tests and poll taxes; a time when only the privileged few could determine the fate of our government.
“The SAVE Act is a full-frontal assault on our right to vote—especially for the working class and communities of color. This Jim Crow-like policy reminds us that democracy and voting rights are far from real for many groups” commented Kaden Ouimet, Board President of the Task Force for Democracy. “Bills like SAVE empower state-level attacks on voting rights and lay the groundwork for legislation targeting nonpartisan voter registration groups.”
“Our fight is to not only defend federal voting rights by defeating the SAVE Act, but also expand them by overturning Shelby v. Holder, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and adopting state-level voting rights acts (VRAs) in places like Maryland and Colorado.”
Congress is set to vote on the SAVE Act in committee today and bring it to the floor later this week. This follows the White House’s executive order last week requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and ordering states to stop counting votes after election day (such as mail-in ballots).Join our rapid-response campaign for Voting Rights to receive updates about the SAVE Act and what you can do to help defeat it in Congress.
