SAVE Act Saves Nothing

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | March 21, 2026

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act will safeguard nothing but might make it much more difficult for anyone to register and vote.

This pointless bit of legislation, which purports to fix a problem we know does not exist, is simply an extension of Donald Trump’s fever dreams about his loss in the 2020 elections. He still shuffles around proclaiming the 2020 race was rigged and he won by “a landslide.” Then he let slip out his real motive when he casually told a group of Republican leaders passing the SAVE Act would guarantee Republicans victory in the 2026 midterm elections.

He’s either convinced Congressional Republicans of both bits of nonsense—the reality is he lost in 2020 and SAVE won’t save his party in November—or, more likely, they have simply acquiesced as they do with everything else he proposes.

At the time of this writing, SAVE has passed the House on a party-line vote but is stalled in the Senate, where opposed Democrats are threatening a filibuster and the 60 votes needed to end such a strategy are nowhere to be found.

So what does this thing do that makes Republicans want it and Democrats abhor it?

The SAVE Act eliminates mail-in voting altogether unless you are disabled or out of the country. People without reliable transportation in rural areas will simply be out of luck. Trump is counting on most of those soon-to-be disenfranchised being Democrat voters. The act also requires paper ballots, though 98 percent of ballots cast are already paper ballots.

SAVE eliminates same-day voter registration. It requires all ballots, including those being mailed, to arrive before polls close on election day. Those postmarked before election day but arriving after will not be counted. It makes it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal and statewide elections, though that is already prohibited in every state. It gives the feds the right to access state’s voter rolls, including all the information included therein.

As is currently the case, it requires a photo ID when registering to vote—but this is where it gets really sticky. Your driver’s license will not be good enough as a photo ID because, except in five states (including Michigan), those licenses do not prove your citizenship. Instead, you will likely need a passport and probably an original birth certificate, not just a copy.

The passport requirement is especially onerous since, according to our State Department, only about 51 percent of voter eligible Americans have passports. Additionally, they can take weeks to obtain and cost $165, which will price out way too many people.

And good luck finding that original birth certificate; it’s probably in one of those files somewhere or maybe in your safe deposit box if you have one. Most states will provide what’s called a certified copy which can be used for passports and various licenses, but the language of the SAVE Act is not clear that will be sufficient.

The Brennan Center for Justice says as many as 21 million current eligible voters could be disenfranchised because they don’t have easy access to passports, birth certificates, or transportation. Many indigenous people, who were here centuries before the European rule-makers showed up, have only tribal ID.

There will be an additional complication for women. If you are a married woman who, like 80 percent of married women, has taken your husband’s or wife’s last name (or you’re a hyphenate), your current ID will not match your birth certificate. According to SAVE, that’s a problem the fine print has not resolved, though surely extra steps will be required to prove you are who you say you are and that you are an American citizen.

There is no legitimate reason to pass SAVE since it solves no problem but causes plenty of new ones. Donald Trump’s fixation with his 2020 loss is like an infection that never heals and is apparently contagious since it has infected other Republicans. Let’s go over this yet again.

Trump’s own Homeland Security Department reviewed, in detail, the 2020 presidential election and declared it to be the “most secure” in our history. Votes in the so-called swing states—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona—were recounted, by both machine and by hand multiple times and those recounts were then audited. No widespread fraud was found because none existed.

In fact, fraud sufficient to change the outcome of elections other than low-vote local elections is simply non-existent in U.S. elections. Non-citizens do not vote and unregistered citizens attempting to vote are stopped. A loss by our preferred candidate is not a sign of fraud or irregularities or a rigged election.

The SAVE Act is a scam designed primarily to disenfranchise voters Donald Trump believes don’t support him. Stripping away voting privileges is typical of autocratic regimes. It could not be more anti-American.