Save Our Voting Rights by Opposing the Federal SAVE America Act
At the urging of President Trump, federal lawmakers in both the House and Senate launched a renewed push to pass the “SAVE America Act,” which would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and an eligible photo ID at the time of voting. The effect of this Act would be to suppress voting rights.
The House of Representatives has already passed this bill, and Republicans are considering a “talking filibuster” to try to get it through the Senate. Please contact Washington’s Senators to show the strength of our opposition to this bill.
Laws already make clear that only American citizens can vote in federal elections. And the National Voter Registration Act requires citizens registering to vote to confirm their citizenship status. Instances of noncitizen voting are very rare.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice share some reasons to oppose the SAVE America Act:
- The value of human dignity asserted in many of our faith traditions, the ideals of our democracy, and the human right to shape the society in which one is a citizen all underpin the right to vote.
- The SAVE America Act would require documentation of citizenship, such as passports or birth certificates, to register to vote or update voter registration. An estimated 9% of eligible voters–21 million–don’t have ready access to these documents. Roughly half of Americans do not own a passport, and 11% of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate. Real IDs do not definitively establish citizenship.
- About 69 million women have legal married names which do not match their birth certificates or passports.
- The SAVE America Act would also impose restrictive photo ID requirements to vote.
- Voters with low incomes, naturalized citizens, voters of color, rural voters, older voters, young voters, and transgender voters would be disproportionately impacted by these restrictions due to financial constraints, mismatched paperwork, and other obstacles.
- The SAVE America Act would force states to engage in voter roll purges every month and turn over Americans’ private, sensitive voter data to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
- The Act would eliminate or upend most methods of registering to vote. Mail and online registration would be essentially abolished, as would voter registration drives that add hundreds of thousands of citizens to the rolls every election cycle. Automatic voter registration would be severely limited in states across the country.
- The bill would also impose an unfunded mandate on election officials, expecting them to assess the validity of citizenship documents and threatening them with criminal and civil penalties if they get things wrong.
- The SAVE Act would go into effect either immediately after enactment, or within the next year or two, depending on the specific provision. Such a rushed implementation of massive policy changes would likely wreak havoc on election administration.
- According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, there are better ways to verify citizenship that put the responsibility on government, not voters.
Many national faith and rights organizations have letters you can sign. Please choose one and sign today!
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
National Council of Jewish Women
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (includes more than 200 groups- -Hindu, Jewish, Interfaith, Muslim, LGBTQ+, Quaker, Native American, Sikh, UCC, UMC, Voto Latino, and more)
And for a proactive step on voting rights, sign here:
NAACP: Advance the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
Get Social