The Only Thing the ‘SAVE America Act’ Aims to Save Is Donald Trump

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Lawmakers who think that they are particularly clever often use the acronyms of their bills to spell out words to obscure the true intent of their legislation. 

This is certainly true for the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” — because the only thing this bill is trying to save is a GOP majority in Congress… and Donald Trump’s butt.

It’s certainly not trying to safeguard democracy.

In fact, the “SAVE America Act” does the opposite, which is why passing it is the top priority of an increasingly desperate president and congressional Republicans who see the writing on the wall: As things stand, they are going to get crushed in a free and fair election in November.

Instead of changing course and adopting some more popular positions — for example, doing something to make health care more affordable for the average American — their preferred solution is to ensure that the midterms will not be free and fair.

And the SAVE America Act will allow them to do that.

If you are unfamiliar with the legislation, here is what it purports to do: According to its Republicans proponents, the bill will ensure that only Americans vote in federal elections.

In the past, we have compared this to robbing a bank and only taking the money from the “Take a penny, leave a penny” tray. It just doesn’t make sense, which is why it’s not a thing that happens.

Is noncitizens voting a problem? You might think it is — if you are foolish enough to believe Trump. In justifying his 2020 election loss, and as part of his decade-long quest to undermine Americans’ confidence in democracy, the president claims that millions of “illegals” are voting.

The reality tells a completely different story.

First of all, it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote. And, since this is a crime with a very limited upside and a major downside, hardly anybody commits it.

Which makes a lot of sense when you look at it through the lens of a real-life example: Let’s say a noncitizen wanted to help unseat Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), the author of the SAVE America Act. To do so, he would have to risk imprisonment and deportation in order to cast a single ballot in a district in which 426,423 people voted in 2024.

In the past, we have compared this to robbing a bank and only taking the money from the “Take a penny, leave a penny” tray. It just doesn’t make sense, which is why it’s not a thing that happens.

We know this because Republicans and their allies have been trying really hard to find cases of “illegal” votes.

Here’s how that’s been going: A comprehensive audit conducted by Georgia’s Republican secretary of state in 2024, for example, found that 20 noncitizens had registered to vote… out of 8.2 million voters.

Or take Utah, the home state of Sen. Mike Lee (R), one of the driving forces behind the SAVE America Act, who said the quiet part out loud this week when he tweeted that failing to pass the bill would be “political suicide” for the GOP.

The office of the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, is in the process of conducting a “Voter Citizenship Review.” While that effort is ongoing, she released preliminary findings last month, and the key takeaway is that this comprehensive review of more than 2 million voter records turned up a single registered voter who appears to be a noncitizen (but who has never voted). One!

So, if the point of the legislation isn’t what Republicans pretend, then what is it?

The SAVE America Act is a massive voter suppression effort that could keep millions of Americans from participating in the midterms. And, since the groups most likely to be disenfranchised — minorities, women, young people — tend to vote for Democrats, its real purpose is to legally rig the midterms (and all subsequent elections) in the GOP’s favor, thereby allowing Trump to skirt any kind of oversight and another impeachment in the final years of his term in office.

It does so by requiring voters to provide documents that millions of them either do not have or would have difficulty producing, such as their birth certificates or a passport.  

In addition, it would adversely affect the tens of millions of women who changed their names when they got married because their new name no longer matches the one on their birth certificates.

If ensuring that only citizens vote were the true goal, it would be much easier to automatically register Americans to vote when they turn 18 (or when they are naturalized). That would accomplish what Republicans claim to want.

However, automatic registration doesn’t work for them. They want potential voters to have to jump through hoops to register and cast their ballots because that suppresses the votes of some of the aforementioned demographics that tend to support Democrats, e.g., young people who are much more progressive.

Next, let’s look at the bill’s ID requirement.

The advocates of the bill make it sound as though presenting a regular picture ID, like a driver’s license or even the new REAL ID, would be sufficient proof of identification at a polling place. But that’s not true because they want voters to have to present proof of citizenship when they cast their ballots.

And that’s also why the polls GOP lawmakers present as evidence that Americans support the ID requirement of the SAVE America Act are meaningless — because voters don’t understand what would be asked of them. Let’s see the results of a survey that asks whether Americans think they should be required to bring a passport or birth certificate every time they vote.

By the way, we aren’t opposed to requiring an ID to vote, but that only works if these identification documents are easy for all US citizens to acquire. However, Republicans have too often weaponized these requirements by making it expensive or burdensome to get the necessary ID, or by restricting which type of photo ID would be allowed. For example, if a state prohibits using a student ID for the verification of a voter’s identity but allows a hunting license, then you can be certain that the GOP is at the helm.

It should be noted that concerns over the provisions of the SAVE America Act aren’t theoretical. We know what is going to happen because this has already been tried. When a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote went into effect in Kansas in 2013, the registrations of 31,000 eligible Americans were rejected — a whopping 12 percent of first-time applicants.

And for what? When the law was challenged in court, the state had to admit that only 39 noncitizens had illegally registered to vote from 1999 to 2012. That’s three per year.

However, instead of deterring Republicans, Kansas’s example seems to have encouraged them… because it delivered precisely the result they hoped to achieve.

Ultimately, what Trump and the GOP want is for them to choose the voters and not the other way around. And the passage of the SAVE America Act would take them a huge step closer to that goal.