The Math Behind the SAVE America Act Does Not Add Up
The stage was set. The presidential seal was mounted on the podium, and a bipartisan housing bill was just waiting for the president’s signature. Then, with about an hour to go, the whole thing collapses. Aides scramble to yank the seal off the podium. The signing is dead. Why? Because President Trump decided, in that moment, that he would not lower anyone’s housing costs until Congress passed a voting bill that almost nobody in his own party can actually pass.
That was Wednesday in Washington, and it tells us most of what we need to know about where the fight over our elections stands right now.
Trump has spent months insisting the SAVE America Act is the most urgent thing in the country. He called its passage a “national emergency” on Truth Social this week, according to his own posts. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, gut voting by mail, and let private citizens sue local election officials. The trouble is that Senate Republicans have told him flatly they do not have the votes, even if they blew up their own rules to try.
The courts have been even less forgiving. On Monday, a federal judge in Washington, a Biden appointee, ruled that the administration’s expanded SAVE database, built to scan voter rolls for noncitizens, violated federal privacy law, according to NPR. The next day, a separate judge struck down Trump’s order requiring proof of citizenship to register. The day after that, Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked his attempt to compile federal lists of “confirmed citizens” and to stop the Postal Service from delivering ballots to anyone left off those lists. Even a Trump appointed judge in Maryland threw out the Justice Department’s demand for that state’s voter files.
So what is all of this actually protecting us from? Here is the part worth sitting with. When the government ran more than 60 million voter records through its revamped SAVE system, it flagged about 21,000 as possible noncitizens, less than 1 percent, according to NPR. In Georgia, a comprehensive audit ordered by the state’s Republican secretary of state found 20 noncitizens on a roll of 8.2 million voters, according to ABC News. Twenty. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, and review after review finds it vanishingly rare.
Now weigh that against the cost. About 1 in 10 eligible voters, roughly 21.3 million of us, say we either do not have or could not quickly find our proof of citizenship, according to a national survey reported by NPR. Married women who changed their names, rural voters, older Americans, anyone who simply cannot lay a hand on a birth certificate this week. A fix aimed at 20 people in Georgia would put millions of the rest of us through the wringer.
And the search keeps widening. ICE agents have pulled local voter files in Webb County, Texas, and Forsyth County, North Carolina, according to Axios. The Justice Department has sued roughly 30 states for their voter rolls, losing case after case.
Here is the thing to hold onto as November approaches. The guardrails are holding because judges, state officials, and senators in both parties keep saying no. Those guardrails are not automatic. They hold because people insist on it. So the next time someone tells us our elections are riddled with fraud, we can simply ask for the number. The number is 20. The real question is whether we let 20 become the excuse to make voting harder for 21 million of us. Go beyond the headlines…
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