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Any legislation titled with a backronym is automatically suspect, and the SAVE America Act—that’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—is no exception. A version of the bill languished last year, but President Trump is now pressuring Senate Republicans to pass it, among his other attempts to subvert the midterm elections. Although the bill seems unlikely to become a law, it could still create chaos and confusion about the race.
The SAVE Act is relatively simple to understand: It requires that anyone wishing to vote provide documentation to prove they are a U.S. citizen. On an intuitive level, this might make sense, because noncitizens aren’t permitted to vote. But the bill is a solution in search of a problem. States already have methods of verifying citizenship, and illegal voting by noncitizens is very rare. The bill also threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters. Although some of the bill’s supporters may be sincere, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem committed a classic Kinsley gaffe on Friday, inadvertently revealing the truth of the administration’s push: It’s a ploy to help Republicans win elections.
“When it gets to Election Day,” she said at an event boosting the bill in Arizona, “we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”
Many states have enacted laws that require photo identification for voting. (Most election laws are made at the state level, though Congress has occasionally passed nationwide laws, such as the 2002 Help America Vote Act.) Studies have found that voter-ID laws have a relatively minor effect on turnout; they are generally popular with voters, but they also disproportionately affect older voters, poorer voters, and minority voters. Politicians who support them like to point out that people need ID to board a plane or buy alcohol—but neither of those is a constitutional right, and violations of alcohol laws are very common. The SAVE Act would go a step further, not only by mandating ID at the federal level but by requiring voters to present proof of citizenship, most likely a passport or a birth certificate. Noncitizen voting simply isn’t a major threat to election integrity, and it’s already punishable under existing laws. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that supports the law, maintains a very helpful database of election fraud. The database contains 99 instances of ineligible voting by noncitizens since 1982. For comparison, more than 150 million votes were cast for president in 2024 alone.
Experts warn that requiring proof of citizenship would shut many Americans out of the polls. Only about half of the population holds a passport. Not all Americans have access to their birth certificate, and even that would not be sufficient for, say, a woman who changed her name at marriage, who would also have to produce proof of marriage. The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein argues that given the cost of establishing proof, the SAVE Act is in effect “a poll tax, a parallel to what Jim Crow laws used to suppress black votes, which the Supreme Court ultimately outlawed.”
If the law passes, Votebeat’s Nathaniel Rakich reports, “there are serious questions about whether it’s even practically possible to implement” by the midterms. Among other problems, the law would require cross-checking state voter rolls against a federal database, also called SAVE (though in this case it stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). But ProPublica reports that the tool is a mess, often turning up inaccurate results.
All that said, the bill seems unlikely to pass. Republican Susan Collins of Maine last week became the 50th senator to back the bill, but because Democrats will filibuster, passing the bill requires 60 votes, which it doesn’t have. Some senators are demanding the end of the filibuster (or the introduction of a “talking filibuster”), but there doesn’t appear to be enough GOP support to make that happen.
Yet Trump doesn’t seem ready to accept defeat. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday. The president promised to issue an executive order, but he has no power to mandate voter-ID requirements—indeed, he has no control over elections, and a previous order requiring proof of citizenship to register has been partially blocked by federal courts. Trump insisted, however, that he has “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.” (No one seems to know what he’s talking about, and keeping expectations low is probably wise. The legal proof will surely be coming right after his health-care plan and Infrastructure Week.)
The president may just be posturing, trying to get Republicans in the Senate to act. But he has shown little interest in stopping where his legal limitations end. And he’s testing other methods of subversion: He has tried to tell states when they can accept ballots and dictate what machines they use, and he recently called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections. Many of his actions seem motivated by a cynical calculus: Even if he loses the battle to enact the SAVE Act or put it into effect via executive order, he may be able to sow doubt about the results of the elections, which he can use if his party fares poorly in November. For his purposes of subverting elections, creating uncertainty may be nearly as effective as a real policy change.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- At least 12 Democratic lawmakers plan to boycott President Trump’s State of the Union address next week and instead attend a “People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall.
- Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director, as acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to people familiar with the matter. He will replace Jim O’Neill, who will be reportedly nominated to lead the National Science Foundation.
- Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in Los Angeles in a landmark trial, in which Meta is accused of designing platforms to be addictive and harm children’s mental health. The case is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits; both Meta and YouTube, which is also named in the suit, deny the allegations.
Evening Read
The Harvard of the South … Of the West?
By Rose Horowitch
Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco? Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too.
Last month, Vanderbilt announced that it was acquiring the facilities of the financially insolvent California College of the Arts and would be converting the space into a new campus. Private universities have been experimenting with satellite campuses for decades. Typically, these outposts are either overseas or limited to a graduate program or two. The Vanderbilt expansion, set to open in 2027, will be different: It will include a full-blown, four-year undergraduate college, not in Abu Dhabi but in the San Francisco Design District. This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of undergraduate education. If it works for Vanderbilt, other selective institutions are likely to follow—because no one really wants to be the Harvard of the South. Everyone wants to be Harvard. Perhaps the way for excellent regional schools to develop a national reputation is to set up shop around the nation.
Read the full article.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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