Brennan Center Letter to the Senate Opposing the SAVE America Act | Brennan Center for Justice

This latest version of the SAVE Act would effectively require every American to produce a passport or birth certificate each time they register or re-register to vote. More than 21 million American citizens do not have those documents readily available. Roughly half of Americans do not even have a passport. Millions lack easy access to a paper copy of their birth certificate. Millions more women whose married names are not on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.

In addition, the SAVE America Act would eliminate or upend most methods of registering to vote. Mail and online registration would be essentially abolished, as would voter registration drives that add hundreds of thousands of citizens to the rolls every election cycle.

It would also direct states to send their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for inspection via the agency’s flawed citizenship verification tool. For months, Democratic and Republican states alike have been refusing similar requests from the Trump administration because of well-founded concerns about misuse of sensitive, private voter data.

The bill would also impose an unfunded mandate on election officials, saddling them with the responsibility of hashing out the practical details, leaving them to cover the costs, and threatening them with criminal and civil penalties if they get things wrong. It would also go into effect immediately, wreaking havoc on election administration.

There are already checks in place to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote. All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes – as Louisiana and Utah just did – have repeatedly confirmed that fact.