If Donald Trump gets his way, millions of women, seniors and service members will lose the right to vote.Trump is pushing hard for the SAVE Act (short for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act). During a primetime address last week, he demanded that Congress send it to his desk. This bill, he claimed, is crucial to fix America’s “crisis of election security.”
U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, sees it differently: “the SAVE Act does not safeguard our elections ‒ it does the opposite.” If passed, it would block a great many American citizens from voting.
This voter suppression bill has not become law, but the threat is real. All of the Republicans representing Michigan in Congress are on record supporting it.
What is in SAVE, and why is it dangerous?
Saving no one
Don’t let the name fool you: The so-called SAVE Act saves no person, no party, no country. Instead, it threatens the rights of ordinary Americans.
Trump’s preoccupation with this bill is blowing up his own party’s priorities. Last month, he sabotaged the reauthorization of a surveillance tool deemed critical to fight terrorism. Why? The SAVE Act was not attached.
Why? The SAVE Act was not attached.
After that, Trump scuttled the signing of a new bill to lower the cost of home-ownership. His own press secretary had called it “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history.” But Trump refused to sign the measure until SAVE had passed. (The housing bill became law, anyway, without his signature.)
Trump was having a temper tantrum, explained U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Delaware: He was “holding hostage the first meaningful housing bill to pass in decades because he is obsessed with his big lie.”
Trump’s big lie is that massive voter fraud cost him the 2020 election. But he knows better: “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?” he told White House staff, referring to his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Trump is pushing the SAVE Act to prevent something he admits never happened.
He is holding real policy hostage for a fake problem.
Proof, papers and poll taxes
Some call the SAVE Act a “voter ID bill.” It is not. Showing identification at the polls is already standard across the country. What this bill demands is something more onerous: “documentary proof of United States citizenship” at the point of voter registration.
Ten percent of Americans have no easy access to citizenship papers. Under this new law, they could not register to vote.
A U.S. passport proves citizenship, but half the country doesn’t have one. New passports cost $165 (and take months to come through). A passport requirement for voting, in other words, would impose a $165 poll tax.
Voters without passports could present an original birth certificate plus a photo ID, but the names on the documents must match. Women who changed their names at marriage would fail that test. This bill could disenfranchise millions of married women.
Whoever thought we would be here, over a century after women won the right to vote in America?
Hitting seniors and servicemembers
The SAVE Act also takes aim at mail-in voting (the method often used by Trump himself). Under the new rules, registering to vote by mail would require an in-person trip to an elections office to prove citizenship. For many rural Americans, homebound seniors, and military families overseas, that trip is impossible.
In short, this is not a voter integrity bill. It is a voter suppression bill. As Slotkin put it, “this bill is not about voter ID …it’s about making it harder to vote so that more Americans are excluded from voting.”
The harm would hit people across the political spectrum, including conservatives. Religious women are more likely than others to take their husbands’ last names. Older voters are more likely to vote by mail. And members of the military serving abroad have no choice but to vote by mail. These are not fringe groups. They are core Republican voters.
Their rights would be trampled if SAVE became law.
Failing on many fronts
This disenfranchisement bill has so far failed in the U.S. Senate. Senators of all stripes, including some Republicans, have denounced it. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, gave an angry speech last week on the Senate floor: “The SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are: all of them are fundamentally flawed.”
An executive order requiring citizenship proof to vote has also failed. A federal judge permanently blocked this order, ruling it unconstitutional. She rejected claims of rampant voter fraud: “There is no evidence in this record of widespread ‘illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error’ within American elections.”
Another federal judge barred the Trump Administration from requiring military personnel to produce citizenship papers when registering to vote.
Trump is flailing about, trying to find some way to make it harder for Americans to vote. So far, he is swinging and missing.
What does this mean for Michigan?
Behind the SAVE Act is the myth of noncitizen voting. The claim is that America has a crisis of foreigners flooding the ballot box. In reality, every state has systems in place to prevent this. And those systems are working: noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare in this country.
Michigan officials identified 15 cases of possible noncitizens voting in 2024. That represents just 0.00028% of ballots cast. Hardly enough to sway an election. Hardly a crisis.
Both of Michigan’s U.S. Senators, Democrats Elissa Slotkin and Gary Peters, are vocal opponents of the SAVE Act. In the House, Michigan Democrats Debbie Dingell, Kristen McDonald Rivet, Hillary Scholten, Haley Stevens, Shri Thanedar and Rashida Tlaib also voted against it.
It’s a different story on the other side of the aisle. Every Republican in Michigan’s House delegation voted yes on this voter suppression measure. Their names are worth remembering: Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar and Tim Walberg.
These Republicans are backing a bill that threatens their own constituents. Michiganders should ask them why, come the next election.
This assumes, of course, that Trump has not succeeded in denying them the right to vote.
Lilia M. Cortina is University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump’s SAVE Act is failing, for now. Who knows how far he’ll go? | Opinion
Reporting by Lilia M. Cortina, Contributing columnist / Detroit Free Press
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By Lilia M. Cortina, Contributing columnist | USA TODAY Network
