SAVE Act looks like racist laws of the past

When Kansas implemented its version of the Trump administration’s looming voter-suppression law, it denied at least 31,000 eligible citizens of their constitutional right to vote.

On the national level, it could block tens of millions of Americans from casting a ballot.

That is, of course, exactly what the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, is intended to do.

Donald Trump himself is on record admitting his belief that allowing all eligible citizens to vote would hurt his party’s chances of winning elections. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah posted polling data showing that his party is expected to lose control of the Senate this year and claimed the voter suppression bill could “turn this around.”

The president told his political allies earlier this month that his voter-suppression bill would “guarantee” their success not only in this year’s midterm elections but “every election for a long time.”

In fact, he is so desperate to keep American citizens from voting that he blew up a deal to end chaos at the nation’s airports, holding Transportation Security Administration funding hostage unless the voter suppression bill is passed.

Millions would be sidelined

The bill that passed the House last month and is currently before the Senate would prevent more eligible citizens from registering to vote than any piece of legislation in American history and is more restrictive than the current law in any state except Ohio. Far from a simple “voter ID” bill, it would require specific proof of citizenship to register to vote.

For most Americans, that means either a U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate along with a government-issued photo ID. But more than 21 million Americans don’t have ready access to those documents, and about half of Americans don’t have a passport at all. Not all birth certificates meet the requirements — about 69 million women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.

Already registered to vote and think the voter suppression law won’t apply to you? You could be in for a nasty surprise. The bill requires voter roll purges every 30 days, eliminating the 90-day protection from being mistakenly thrown off the rolls right before Election Day. Voters might not realize they’ve been purged until they show up at their polling place — and most of us will have to show up at a polling place. Even though eight states and the District of Columbia conduct safe and secure elections entirely by mail, the bill prohibits universal mail voting.

Anti-democracy activists have been invoking the myth of voter fraud to justify voter suppression for nearly two centuries, but have never been able to back up their claims with evidence. In 1883, Chicago party officials hired investigators to monitor polling locations and offered a $300 reward to anyone who helped “in the apprehension and conviction of anyone who voted illegally.” No one was convicted.

An official who testified in defending the Kansas law admitted that over a span of 18 years, only 13 non-citizens had ended up on the voter rolls in Sedgwick County, none of which could be shown to be intentional rather than administrative errors. Only five noncitizens actually cast a ballot.

The secretary of state who unsuccessfully defended the Kansas voter suppression law, Kris Kobach, also failed to unearth evidence of voter fraud as vice-chair of the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” established in 2017 to appease Trump’s embarrassment over losing the popular vote.

False claims of fraud were integral to the fake elector plot that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but none of the more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election produced any credible evidence of fraud, much less non-citizen voting.

The rhetoric that the Trump administration and its allies are using to promote the specter of noncitizen voting echoes the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory of a plot to diminish the influence of white people.

In 2024, then-Washington Post columnist Philip Bump called the voter suppression scheme the Great Replacement theory in legislation form. The legislation itself, which imposes onerous financial burdens on voters, is nothing short of a resurrection of the poll taxes of the Jim Crow era. And just like the racist Plessy v. Ferguson decision that gave rise to that dark period, the SAVE America Act belongs on the scrap heap of history.

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002.