Restricting the Ballot: How the SAVE Act Could Undermine Voting Rights
This guest post does not necessarily reflect the views or expertise of Human Rights First. It is part of a partnership between UCLA Law and Human Rights First, where UCLA Law students use the new Democracy Watch tracker to analyze legislative threats to democracy.
A new bill in the U.S. House could make it harder to register to vote, and it has the potential to disenfranchise millions of Americans.
The bill, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), would narrow the forms of ID considered acceptable for registering to vote in federal elections. US elections are administered by the states, which have broad discretion in deciding what to require of citizens registering to vote. The SAVE Act would mandate that states only accept certain forms of ID for voter registration. Voters could provide a passport or, alternatively, a state ID card in combination with a birth certificate that matches the name on their ID. Many married women in the US change their last names when they marry, creating a potential barrier for them as well as voters who have changed their names for other reasons, including to reflect their gender identities.
If passed, the SAVE Act could effectively disenfranchise millions.
According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, 140 million Americans lack passports and 69 million married women have ID cards with a name that doesn’t match their birth certificate. It’s unclear how eligible voters would be impacted, but the impact could be widespread and many fear they will be barred from voting if the bill passes.
Americans that have passports tend to have higher income than those that don’t, suggesting that requiring a passport to vote would disproportionately impact people from lower socioeconomic strata.
The bill provides that states could also accept “A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.” The REAL ID Act, passed under the George W. Bush administration, aimed to prevent undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses by requiring states to check immigration status before issuing IDs. As currently implemented, however, none of the state-issued REAL IDs indicate a person’s citizenship status on the ID card itself, meaning that they likely won’t meet the requirements of the SAVE Act as written.
The SAVE Act, which was first introduced last year by Texas Congressman Chip Roy, would also bar online voter registration. (Last year’s version passed the House but stalled in the Senate.) Currently, 38 states allow online voter registration, an important tool for elderly, immunocompromised and disabled people who may face hurdles in registering in person.
Supporters of the bill claim it’s necessary to stop noncitizens from voting—a nearly nonexistent problem in the United States. A 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed 42 jurisdictions that voted in the 2016 election and found only 30 cases of noncitizens voting out of 23 million votes cast. Despite rampant conspiracies claiming that non-eligible voters helped “steal” the 2020 election, the small number of illegally cast votes had no impact on that election.
Voter fraud by noncitizens is a key element of anti-democratic conspiracy theories that aim to undermine confidence in US elections, which were supercharged by President Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election and have metastasized over the past four years causing significant concern to election officials and democracy experts across the country. Before last year’s presidential elections, some Republican leaders falsely claimed that Democrats were plotting to steal the election by encouraging or compelling noncitizens to vote illegally, and a significant conspiracy movement has seized on the claims, with polls showing up to 38% of Americans falsely believe voter fraud gave the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
The SAVE Act is one small piece of this much broader attack on democratic institutions from an anti-democratic movement. In the first two months of 2025, state legislatures have introduced at least 250 bills aimed at making it more difficult to vote. These include numerous bills that mirror the SAVE Act at the state level, meaning that even if the bill fails at the national level, some states could impose similar requirements for their residents.
The SAVE Act risks disenfranchising millions of American voters, and offers little benefit in election security. To preserve free and fair elections for all Americans, the bill should be voted down.
Andrew Beale is a law student at UCLA School of Law. Prior to law school, he worked as a journalist covering topics including the criminal justice system, the Israel/Palestine conflict and immigration. He holds a Bachelor’s from the University of New Mexico and a Master’s of Journalism from UC Berkeley.
