A poison solution looking for a problem: the SAVE America Act

We already have secure US citizen voting

Everyone agrees that we should have secure elections with only US citizens voting. We already do. We enjoy a secure and accurate system of US citizen voting now. That’s how we know that Donald Trump’s insistence on the SAVE America Act is to suppress votes he doesn’t like and to sow doubt about our elections.

Trump is now demanding that the Senate abolish the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, which the House has already approved. He’s threatening to refuse to sign any other legislation until it passes.

What is the SAVE America Act?

The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) American Act requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote and then provide a photo ID when voting. The most common documents that would satisfy the Act are birth certificates, current passports, and naturalization certificates.

The stated reason for the SAVE America Act is completely bogus

Donald Trump claims that non-citizens vote in large numbers, millions of them preventing him from winning the popular vote in 2016. He’s still making these claims. They are bullshit.

Citizenship is already required to register and vote and anyone violating that law faces criminal penalties.

Repeated Republican attempts to find any significant such fraud have all failed. After the 2016 election, Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to find voting fraud and named Vice-President Pence as chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — a big promoter of voter fraud allegations — the vice-chair. They met, they searched, and then quietly dissolved in early 2018 because they could find no significant voter fraud.

The MAGA Heritage Foundation found that from 1999-2023 there were 87 instances of the kind of fraud Trump says is rampant, out of more than a billion ballots. That’s .00000764%.

“Utah, for example, performed a citizenship review of its entire voter registration list from April 2025 through January 2026. After a time-intensive, multi-step review of more than 2 million registered voters, they identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.” Five Things to Know About the SAVE America Act, Bipartisan Policy Center, Feb. 2, 2026. Louisiana performed a similar search with similar results.

Governments across America have ways of verifying a voter’s citizenship using existing government data and they do. They can flag potential non-citizens and require them to provide proof. As we know, this system works.

The SAVE America Act is the classic solution looking for a problem.

Why shouldn’t we ask people for proof of citizenship?

Asking for proof of citizenship sounds reasonable. Why not do it? Because it turns out that the Act would create problems, like causing anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of people to not vote.

Research by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that more than 21 million Americans do not have easy access to a birth certificate or current passport. Obtaining a birth certificate costs money and entails hassle. Further, the Act requires that the documents be authenticated; the birth certificate from the dusty box in the attic may not suffice. More cost and hassle.

The act also requires that the documentation be presented in person, which creates particular challenges for the elderly and those with disabilities. More hassle.

Families who have lost their documents in fires or natural disasters would be particularly hard hit. And people would have to re-produce the documentation, in person, every time they move.

Critically, the Act requires the name on the birth certificate to match the person’s current identity, which will not be the case for an estimated 69 million women who have married and changed their names. They would have to also produce a certified marriage certificate, or more than one if they married more than once. Again, more cost and hassle.

The requirement for a photo ID at the polling station is more restrictive than voter ID laws in every state but Ohio. Military IDs and IDs from state universities would not be allowed.

The Act would eliminate the use of on-line voter registration systems now used by 42 states, who would have to revert to more costly, labor intensive in-person registration. Political parties and others, like the League of Women Voters, could no longer conduct voter registration drives as they do now.

People are busy, voting is not their first priority. The more barriers we erect, the fewer people will register and vote. These barriers will cause the most problems for the poor, elderly, people of color, and those with disabilities.

“Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before [the Kansas version of the SAVE Act] took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.” Five Things, Bipartisan Policy Center

In addition, the SAVE America Act requires states to regularly submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to run through their error-prone citizenship verification program. States would also rightly fear misuse of this data.

Finally, all this new work would fall on overburdened, underfunded, and burned out election workers already unjustly vilified by Trump and MAGA. The Act is a huge unfunded mandate. The Act exposes election workers to the potential of five years in prison, even if they make an honest mistake. So they will err on the side of turning a voter away, even if that voter is eligible. The legislation would also take immediate effect, ensuring chaos and confusion because there would be no time to prepare.

What’s really going on here

We know that Donald Trump WILL try to prevent free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028. He has said as much and he’s already laying the groundwork, including perpetuating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The SAVE America Act is only one of his strategies.

The primary purpose of the SAVE America Act is voter suppression, doing as much as possible to reduce the number of Democratic votes. The potential irony here is that it’s not clear that more Democratic voters would be deterred than Republican voters.

Beyond this primary purpose, Trump uses the SAVE America Act and a host of other lies and propaganda to undermine faith in our voting systems. Creating chaos and doubt about elections serves as another voter suppression tool and also sets him up to justify federal intervention to disrupt the next election.

The bottom line is that fewer Americans will vote under the SAVE America Act and fewer Americans will trust our elections. That’s the opposite of saving America.

N.B. There are several versions of the SAVE America Act. One, the Make Elections Great Again Act, is substantially more restrictive, e.g. does away with automatic mail-in voting systems. Trump has also proposed adding a provision to the Act to prevent transgender people from voting, yet another way to demonize these fellow Americans and whip up support for voter suppression.