The Anti-Voter SAVE Act Must Be Stopped

If passed, it would be the most restrictive voting bill ever approved.

By Michael Waldman and Emily Whitehead

The SAVE Act, which would be the most restrictive anti-voter bill ever passed by Congress, will soon hit the Senate floor.

Since our nation’s founding, whenever Congress passed legislation regulating elections, it has largely expanded voting rights. In fact, it was 61 years ago this week when President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to pass what would become the Voting Rights Act, which empowered millions of people of color to vote.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Yet, when a war is raging in the Middle East and an affordability crisis is brewing at home, the Senate is poised to begin what could be a marathon debate on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a bill that would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting — reversing decades of progress.

President Trump declared that this anti-voter bill should be Congress’s top priority and pledged not to sign any bills (except for funding for the Department of Homeland Security) until Congress sends him the SAVE Act.

It’s a risky gamble for senators to take. When asked what is the most important problem facing the country today, zero percent of voters said “election integrity” in a recent New York Times/Siena poll. Alternatively, a NBC News poll showed that “threats to democracy” has risen to voters’ top issue.

The SAVE Act would effectively require voters to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Research conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, VoteRiders, and the University of Maryland shows that 21 million citizens lack ready access to those documents. That doesn’t include married women who have changed their names and would have to jump through extra hoops to prove their citizenship.

The bill would also require voters to show their papers in person, upending voter registration across the country just months before election day. Voters could no longer register to vote by mail or online or through a voter registration drive.

Proponents want to label this a “voter ID bill,” but it does much more than require a photo ID to vote. (The Brennan Center has supported voter ID requirements in the past, such as in the Freedom to Vote Act.) In any case, the ID provision in the bill is more restrictive than in every state except Ohio.

And it would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the DHS, supposedly so it could compare state rolls with its own citizenship data. But this data has historically been filled with inaccuracies, and its use would likely lead to eligible voters being wrongfully booted from the rolls. Republican and Democratic states alike have been fighting off demands for this data from the Department of Justice over concerns about misuse of voters’ private data.

The SAVE Act originally passed the House of Representatives in 2025, but thanks to nationwide public opposition, it did not have enough support to overcome a threatened filibuster in the Senate.

The latest legislative push is again in the name of a conspiracy theory, which wrongly claims that noncitizens widely participate in our elections. Noncitizen voting is already illegal and vanishingly rare. States have multiple checks in place to ensure only American citizens vote. Earlier this year, after conducting a review of the state’s voter rolls, Utah’s top election officer, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, found only one single person registered to vote who was not a U.S. citizen. Zero had actually voted. In fact, the lieutenant governor herself was thrown off the rolls in 2022 after being mistakenly identified as a potential noncitizen. The reason? Her father was stationed overseas in the U.S. Air Force when she was born. Similar investigations have been done in Louisiana and Nevada, and all have found that noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. Even the Trump administration itself has combed through tens of millions of voter registrations with little to show for it.

However unpopular, Republicans are continuing to heed Trump’s call. They may try to force a “talking filibuster.” This would effectively bring the legislative process to a halt, allowing Democrats to hold the floor and try to bring endless amendments on any topic, from gas prices to the war in Iran to the Epstein files.

Why is this the top priority?

Since the start of this administration, Trump has led a concerted strategy to undermine our elections. That strategy has only escalated as we draw ever closer to the midterms. It includes the numerous lawsuits brought against states that refused to hand their voter rolls to the Justice Department. It includes the February FBI raid in Fulton County to seize 2020 ballots and revamp claims of election fraud. And it involves the lawless executive order signed by Trump a year ago purporting to overhaul election rules. Most provisions in that order have been struck down in federal court. As one judge declared: “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the power to regulate federal elections.”

We have been tracking and warning about this strategy for months. But recently, Trump has begun saying the quiet part out loud. He called for Republicans to “take over the voting,” and the White House has said that the SAVE Act is part of that effort. The bill, Trump said to Republicans, “will guarantee the midterms.”

Sixty-one years ago, LBJ urged Congress to join him in “working long hours,” even “nights and weekends,” to ensure the right to vote. Republicans and Democrats joined together. They recognized that the fundamental right to vote is not a partisan issue.

We now have a president, speaking with the same tenacity and urgency, urging Congress to restrict that very right. We should not be surprised. But we should be prepared.

Senators must stand strong and block the bill. The courts must continue to make clear that the president has no lawful role over elections. And we must all do our part to speak out against this bill and any efforts by this administration to meddle with the vote.

As LBJ said on protecting the freedom to vote: “There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us.”

Michael Waldman is president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. He is the author of The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America and The Fight to Vote. Emily Whitehead is an executive communications strategist at the Brennan Center. Previously, she served on the speechwriting and communications teams at the White House, where she crafted speeches and conducted research for the Executive Office of the President.

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