The SAVE Act: Yet Another Dressed-Up Voter Suppression Bill

A solution desperately searching for a problem—that’s the most generous description I can offer for Texas Rep. Chip Roy’s reintroduced “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.”

Behind its patriotic acronym (SAVE) and reasonable-sounding premise lies the latest iteration of a tired political strategy: identify which demographics tend to vote for your opponents, create requirements that disproportionately burden those groups, package it as “security,” and act shocked when people call it what it is—voter suppression.

The bill’s core requirement? Everyone must provide IN-PERSON proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Not a copy. The actual document. In person.

Let’s talk about who this really hurts:

Married Women

About 69 MILLION women in the US have changed their names after marriage. You think all their documentation perfectly matches? Hell no. My sister had to take a day off work, pay $120, and wait 6 weeks just to get her passport updated after she got married. Many women never bother updating their birth certificates because it’s such a hassle.

People Without Documentation Access

The Brennan Center found that 11% of eligible voters don’t have the required documentation. That’s millions of people. Guess who’s overrepresented in that group? Poor people. People of color. People who work multiple jobs and can’t take a day off to stand in line at a government office.

Young Voters

College students often don’t have their birth certificates with them at school, and getting copies sent can be a bureaucratic nightmare, especially if they’re from out of state.

Trans People

Don’t even get me started on the nightmare that trans folks face with documentation. Many have identification documents that don’t match their current name or gender presentation.

All this to solve what problem exactly? I looked into the actual numbers:

  • A comprehensive Brennan Center study found 30 cases of non-citizen voting out of 23.5 MILLION votes in 2016. That’s 0.0001%.
  • Even the Heritage Foundation (hardly a liberal organization) only found 24 cases over TWENTY YEARS.

This is like requiring everyone to wear a hazmat suit to prevent lightning strikes.

The strategy is so transparent it’s insulting:

  1. Identify which demographics tend to vote for your opponents
  2. Find requirements that disproportionately burden those groups
  3. Package it as “security” or “integrity”
  4. Act shocked, SHOCKED when people call it what it is: voter suppression

I used to try to assume good faith in these debates. Maybe they’re just really concerned about election security? But the math doesn’t add up. You don’t create barriers that could affect MILLIONS to prevent something that happens at a rate of 0.0001%.

Bottom Line

The most frustrating part is watching people fall for it. “But don’t you want secure elections?” Yes, I do. I also want proportionate responses to actual threats, not sledgehammers to kill ants while ignoring the elephants in the room (like election systems without paper trails or proper auditing).

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