SAVE Act: A pretext for claiming fraud?

The GOP’s “latest ploy” to prevent election fraud is “a solution in search of a problem,” said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. President Trump is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill requires voters to prove citizenship with a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers. But multiple studies have found that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and SAVE could disenfranchise millions of Americans who don’t have passports or copies of their birth certificates. That would disproportionately affect older, poorer, and minority voters. The estimated 80% of married women who have changed their last names may also need to provide proof of marriage. In effect, SAVE would act like a poll tax, discouraging voting by creating added cost and time for certain groups. Republicans seem unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster, but Trump said if SAVE fails, he will issue an executive order requiring photo ID to vote. Even if it’s not enforced, it will achieve his goal of “creating uncertainty” about election integrity, so that he can claim that all Democratic victories are fraudulent.

Progressives assail voter ID laws as “racist and unjust,” said Rachel Bovard in The Free Press, but polls show that 83% of Americans support them. No one calls it discriminatory that we need ID to fly or drive. Trump is simply fixing a “gaping hole” in election integrity. Preventing voter fraud is “a virtuous and popular goal,” said National Review in an editorial, but the Constitution explicitly grants states the power to run elections. Federalizing them through the SAVE Act would weaken the states’ authority—which conservatives should fear. Besides, it’s already a crime for noncitizens to vote, and only a tiny number would risk arrest and deportation to cast a ballot. Why “swat a fly with a sledgehammer”?

The SAVE Act is only the Right’s “opening salvo,” said Annie Karni in The New York Times. The House is considering “an even more restrictive measure” that would ban all mail-in voting and end the counting of ballots on election night—another Trump demand. “Trump may not get away with this,” said Michael Tomasky in The New Republic, but he will try to keep GOP control of Congress by any means necessary. If in November you see “armed thugs” intimidating people at polling places, seizing ballots, and creating chaos, “it won’t be Tanzania or Bangladesh.” It will be Trump’s America.