The U.S. House may soon vote on a bill with a seemingly innocuous name — the SAVE Act, as in "Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act."
It is anything but innocuous — especially for the millions of Americans who could find themselves prevented from registering to vote if the SAVE Act is passed.
Ostensibly, the SAVE Act is aimed at preventing people who are in the country illegally from voting in U.S. elections — something that is so rare as to be nearly non-existent.
What its Republican sponsors don’t tell you is that the SAVE Act, with its requirement that people show proof of citizenship, could end up disenfranchising millions of Americans who are and always have been legal citizens of this country.
“It all sounds so reasonable,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio and a longtime advocate of voter rights. “But it has the potential to prevent so many people from registering to vote, through no fault of their own.”
Republican legislators in the last two sessions of Congress have been pushing for passage of the SAVE Act. It was passed by the House last summer, but there was no Senate vote; and it was reintroduced when the new 119th Congress convened in January.
Nicole Hansen, policy counsel for the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center, which is opposed to the bill, told WVXU a House vote on the SAVE Act could come as soon as the end of this month.
What does the SAVE Act do?
Here’s exactly what the SAVE Act would do:
- It would require people who want to register to vote or update their voting information to provide documentation of their status as citizens — either with a birth certificate or a passport.
- The documentation would have to be presented in person at their local boards of elections, in effect ending the online registration that 42 states — including Ohio — have for their citizens.
- It would also effectively end the very common practice of organizations conducting voter registration drives, as most people don’t carry their passports or birth certificates around with them.
Recent data from the State Department shows about half of all American citizens do not have a passport, and it costs $130 to get one — with an additional $60 to expedite the process.
Impacts for married women, military, rural and young voters
According to the Center for American Progress, there are 69 million women in the U.S. who have taken the names of their spouses, which means they can’t produce a birth certificate that matches their current name. And that is a requirement of the SAVE Act.
Hansen said one of the groups that will be the most effected by this bill are the 60 million voters who live in rural areas.
“If those rural people can’t do this online, many of them will have to drive an hour or more to the county seat in order to register,’’ Hansen said.
Military service members overseas will no longer be able to use their military IDs to register. And the impact is likely to frustrate many young voters ages 18-24, who tend to have frequent address changes.
Officials' reactions to the SAVE Act
Ohio’s chief elections officer, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, regularly touts Ohio’s online voter registration on his website. Online registration would be eliminated if the bill LaRose has said he supports is passed.
LaRose’s office did not respond to WVXU’s requests for an interview on the SAVE Act. But, last fall, he put this statement on his website:
“Americans deserve to know their elections are secure and the results accurately reflect the will of the people. In Ohio, we take our responsibility for maintaining accurate voter rolls seriously — but we need additional federal data to verify only citizens are registered to vote. The SAVE Act would provide states with that data, and I’m grateful to Congressional leaders for making it a priority.”
The SAVE Act, said Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, “seems like a part of a larger effort to make it harder for people they don’t like to vote. You can look at the documentation they require and you can tell who they want to disenfranchise.”
Landsman said there is a very practical reason why immigrants who are undocumented rarely register to vote, much less cast ballots.
“Why would undocumented people do this?” Landsman posited. “They don’t want to call attention to themselves. If they tried to vote, they could go to jail and likely be deported. It would make no sense.”
Landsman was among the thousands of Americans who last weekend went to Selma, Alabama, for the 60th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” — the March 7, 1965 march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Civil Rights marchers were beaten by police with billy clubs and chased down by fire hoses and police on horses.
The late John Lewis, a then-future congressman, was among the activists severely beaten by police that day.
“I walked the bridge again and again that day, four or five times,’’ Landsman said. “I was thinking about the sacrifices made by John Lewis, Dr. King, and so many others — all of which led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that year.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2013 decision, gutted key provisions to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed all Americans the right to register and to vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 29 states — including Ohio — have passed nearly 100 new laws restricting voting rights since that Supreme Court decision.
Landsman supports the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which is also pending in Congress. It would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act to its pre-2013 condition.
“But the SAVE Act would throw us back into a second era of Jim Crow laws, which made it nearly impossible for Blacks in the South to register,” Landsman said. “The SAVE Act would create new ‘poll taxes’ like the ones of the 1950s and early 1960s."
Any time money leaves a person's pocket in order to vote — be it by the literal poll taxes of the early 19th century or by requiring a valid passport, as the SAVE Act does — it could be considered a poll tax.
But, Landsman says, the SAVE Act "is much more devious than the poll taxes. Americans should not have to spend money in order to vote.”
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