Mother Jones / Ari Berman - House Republicans Are Set to Pass a Voter Suppression Bill That Would Disenfranchise Millions

“It’s a five-alarm fire for American voters and for election officials”

Ari Berman
32 minutes ago

An illustration of an oval white sticker with "I Voted" in blue at the center with an American flag billowing to the left. The sticker is torn in two between the "T" and "E".
Mother Jones illustration; Getty

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Two weeks after Donald Trump issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order, the House of Representatives is set to pass a measure, the SAVE Act, that is described by voting rights advocates as perhaps the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress. It could disenfranchise millions of voters and would severely limit how Americans can register to vote.

“If the SAVE Act were enacted, this would be the first federal voter suppression bill in recent memory, and possibly ever,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program. “It would be an unprecedented burden on tens of millions of Americans and would block millions of Americans from voting and participating in our democracy. It’s a five-alarm fire for American voters and for election officials.”

Under the alleged need of stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal and exceedingly rare, it would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote.

Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups. Sixty percent of them voted in the 2020 election. Close to 4 million don’t have these documents at all, because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.

But the number of impacted voters is much larger than just those who don’t possess or have easy access to citizenship documents. According to the Pew Research Center, 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name and could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill. Interestingly enough, conservative Republican women and Republican/Republican-leaning women were the two groups most likely to take their partner’s name. Greta Bedekovics, associate director for democratic policy at the Center for American Progress, calls this “a marriage penalty” that “completely ignores the implications of the 19th Amendment.”

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