THE SAVE ACT. If you know, you know. And, if you don't, you should.
If you don’t know what the SAVE Act is, you should. Make no mistake. The SAVE Act is a voter suppression bill disguised as a security bill. Its intention is to silence millions of Americans.
The SAVE Act would require citizens to present a passport or a birth certificate that matches their current name to register to vote or update their voter registration. These are documents that 21 million Americans lack easy access to, and almost half of all Americans lack a passport.
In its current form, the Bill, if passed, would go into effect immediately and eliminate online or mail-in registration, literally upending how most Americans register to vote.
The SAVE Act would disproportionately burden women who have changed their names, usually when they marry, so that their birth certificate will not satisfy the bill’s proof requirements―that’s an estimated 69 million women. Others who will find it hard to comply are senior voters who don’t have easy access to such documents, rural voters, people with low incomes, and naturalized citizens who could be wrongly removed from voter rolls due to outdated or mismatched data.
If a birth certificate is not available or does not show a person’s current name, a passport is the only alternative. But that takes weeks to get and costs money―$165 plus shipping for a first-time applicant. The more limited passport card costs $30. The SAVE Act is really just a revival of the unconstitutional poll tax.
There is also a move to require a photo ID. All of this is happening in the name of “protecting” our election process from non-citizens voting. But non-citizen voting is astonishingly rare and already illegal. The SAVE Act is a voter suppression tool disguised as a solution to a manufactured problem that doesn’t exist.
Is protecting the integrity of our elections important? You betcha. But, is there actually a widespread problem with ineligible people voting? The answer is unequivocally NO. Want the facts? Check out this article.