—Pope Francis, spontaneous question and answer session, 07 June 2013

This bill doesn’t SAVE America; it creates fear and breaks trust

The SAVE America Act (H.R.7296 / S.1383) does just the opposite of its name. It would create significant barriers to voting for over 20 million eligible United States citizens, dramatically shifting the participating electorate. It capitalizes on fear created by misinformation about non-citizens and fraudulent votes, a statistically non-existent factor dismissed even by President Trump’s own voting integrity commission in 2018. The difficulties with complying would effectively recreate poll taxes, skirting the spirit of democracy to solve a problem we don’t have and consolidating power in the hands of a small, privileged minority who happen to hold it at the moment.

This bill has already passed the House of Representatives and is on the floor before the Senate. President Trump has threatened that no other bill will become law until this one reaches his desk, leveraging pressure from the partial government shutdown affecting airport security lines and disaster relief payments to interfere in upcoming elections around the nation. We need Congress to remain steadfast against a number of injustices at once.

Please use the draft email in the grey box at right (below on mobile devices) to urge your senators to vote NO on the SAVE America Act and any similar bills that create barriers for legal voters to exercise their rights at the polls.

Background

Voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. By any measure, election security in every jurisdiction is already so strong that even if someone were to break laws to vote, it’s often a mistake, and that vote’s effect would be so negligible that statistics can’t display it in a meaningful way. The SAVE America Act isn’t designed to solve an existing problem; it’s designed to disenfranchise huge swaths of the United States voting population. Every barrier to registering or correcting a voter’s registration is a point at which a legal voter might stop trying, creating a non-voter from someone who intended to cast a legal vote.

Updating voter registration by mail, online, or by visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles would be eliminated. Folks who can’t take time off work during government office hours, those who lost documents in disasters or simply when moving, those who’ve changed names by marriage or for other purposes—all these and more would likely become non-voters. One amendment would put an end to voting by mail. Not only that, but voters’ registration information would be provided to the Department of Homeland Security, a department that has already been granted authority in some places to selectively remove voters from those rolls. What’s more, the stipulations of the SAVE America Act have a disproportionate, racially weighted effect. 8–9 percent of all U.S. citizens do not have the documents this bill would require, but among People of Color, that number is roughly 11 percent.