Your senior neighbor goes to the local polling place to vote in the federal election, as she has proudly done for many years. She shows her driver’s license, and is shocked to find that it is no longer an acceptable form of ID for her to vote.
If the current version of the Save America Act passes the Senate, your neighbor, along with all Americans, would be required to provide documentary proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. America’s previous system merely called for voters to prove identity, since election officials already verified eligibility based on voter registration records and database checks. Your neighbor’s REAL ID no longer meets the new bill’s proof-of-citizenship requirement. Only a few special enhanced REAL ID’s from MI, MN, NY, VT, and WA include citizenship proof- and your neighbor doesn’t have one of those.
The poll worker tells your neighbor that she can show a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers for additional proof. That sounds easy enough, right?
Except your neighbor could be among the millions of US citizens that would lack documents in order to vote in federal elections.
Passport? Around 140 million or more American citizens do not have a passport.
Birth certificate? Your neighbor- like up to 69 million other American women– would not have a birth certificate that matches her current legal married name. She’d have to provide her birth certificate, marriage certificate and divorce decree if applicable, to create a legal document chain showing her name changes.
Correct documents? Lots of people only have a decorative “hospital copy” of their birth, or a keepsake wedding certificate. These ceremonial documents are not certified and not usable for legal verification.
Available paperwork? Additionally, more than 9% (21.3 million people) of the voting population even lack readily available paperwork- with documents stored in a relative’s house or a safety deposit box- one reason many younger voters might have difficulties voting.
No paperwork? 3.8 million people don’t have legal documents at all- their papers have been lost, destroyed or stolen.
Paperwork complications? These barriers can arise with Americans born abroad to US parents, older Native Americans whose birth records are held by multiple agencies, seniors born before standardized record-keeping or those from home births that were registered later.
An additional caveat of the SAVE America Act is that it would require states to provide their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to run through their citizenship verification tool. Dozens of states have previously refused similar requests from the federal government, due to concerns about potential misuse of personal data. Those concerns are well-founded, in light of recent incidents in which DOGE team members within the Social Security Administration misused voter data by turning state voter rolls over to an advocacy group.
Beyond concerns about data misuse, states would also face enormous unfunded mandates created by the passing of the SAVE America Act- including processing and verifying documents, upgrading systems and personnel, and ensuring legal compliance.
The SAVE America Act is being presented as a safeguard for federal elections, but its real-world effects could actually threaten the foundations of America’s representative democracy. By requiring proof-of-citizenship documents that millions of eligible Americans do not readily possess, the bill risks disenfranchising a wide range of voters. Those voters most disenfranchised would be seniors, younger voters, communities of color, women, and lower-income people. In seeking to ‘protect’ elections, this legislation could paradoxically restrict eligible voter participation, by placing both citizens and state governments under a potentially destabilizing burden. This undermines the basic principle that America’s government derives its legitimacy from the broad, free, and equal participation of its citizens.