The SAVE Act: the newest development in Trump’s “papers, please” America

Photo courtesy of United States Congress/Wikimedia Commons

Last Wednesday, Feb. 11, the House of Representatives passed the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” or “SAVE” Act, an expansion of a previous (and less rigorous) SAVE Act introduced in 2024. Years of Trump’s election paranoia alleging widespread voter fraud have culminated in legislation proudly indulging the fantasy and turning congressional scrutiny against the people that gave them their jobs, rather than against a president who is constantly encroaching on their ability to perform them.

This latest chapter in an exhausting legislative campaign of appeasement to Trump, which continuously astounds me with the ability to reach new lows every day, would create new barriers to voting through requirements for proof of citizenship during voter registration—a fitting move for a country that is rapidly building a reputation as a “papers, please” hellscape. Thriving on the regime’s persistent racist tirade against immigrants, this bill entertains Trumpian conspiracies about rampant illegal voting by noncitizens, which, as you may confidently assume, are based solely on the imaginings of a sick and senile old man; NPR cited a survey from the Brennan Center for Justice performed on jurisdictions with large immigrant populations after the 2016 election and found that the percentage of noncitizen voting was a miniscule 0.0001 percent, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

That the SAVE Act is gaining renewed ground in Congress shortly after Trump’s FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia because of nearly decade-old, unfounded claims of a “stolen election” in 2020, according to a report by AP News, frankly does not shock me; Trump and his sycophants are becoming increasingly manic about bringing the midterm elections under tight authoritarian control, even attempting to coerce states like Minnesota into turning over their voter rolls by leveraging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s campaign of terror against their residents, as The New York Times documented. Passing a bill that impedes voting in the first place almost seems tame in the face of these other blatant attacks on voting rights and electoral procedure. 

If passed, the bill would take immediate effect, resulting in a massive scramble for voters to gather the necessary paperwork to either register or update their registration. Requiring photo identification and proof of citizenship, although it may seem like no big deal at first glance, actually imposes major barriers to registration; Forbes reports that “only about half of Americans have a valid U.S. passport, a process that typically takes four to six weeks and costs around $130,” and The Guardian cites the Southern Poverty Law Center, which “estimates that 21 million Americans neither have a copy of their birth certificate nor a passport. Those potential voters are more likely to be poor or people of color, the organization says.” Passing the act would thus ensure that huge swaths of the population not only lose access to voter registration, but actually have to pay in order to get it back—a chilling reminder of poll taxes used to disenfranchise Black Americans for years until the practice was finally declared unconstitutional in the 1960s.

There is also outrage over the implication that individuals who have changed their name, especially transgender individuals or those who took a spouse’s last name, would have to prove their identity multiple times over, given their names do not match the name on their birth certificates.

What galls me in particular about this string of insults to a process that is fundamental to our near-obsolete branding as a democracy is the way it shifts accountability. People need to be vetted, prove themselves multiple times over, and even pay to do so, to “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility.” But a man who himself would not be able to vote on account of felony status needs no accountability, no additional documentation, and can freely declare that the electoral system is threatened more by noncitizens than by his own questionable claim to the country’s highest authority and unabashed consolidation of power to indulge his fantasies of an unlawful third term. In a warped political landscape like this, voter rolls and personal information are ransom, and even citizenship in and of itself is no longer a guarantee to democratic participation.

It’s difficult to find the words to capture my frustration with the rigorous standards to which we hold the average American at the behest of a convicted felon implicated thousands of times over in cases of rape, sex trafficking, and murder, all of which have expressly and viciously targeted children. And yet, while this criminal (a shamefully general term which I employ only for expediency) faces not even a call for impeachment, the American populace may face greater pressure over an essential right than the entire Trump regime has in a year of flagrantly evading the Constitution, brutalizing cities, and skirting around justice for a massive sex trafficking operation that has ruined countless lives. This all begs the question—if large portions of the population don’t have the resources or the funds to prove their ability to vote, what privileges does citizenship really afford us if the SAVE Act is passed?