The “SAVE Act” Threatens All Our Voting Rights—That’s a Feature, Not a Bug

MAGA Republicans Continue to Assault Our Voting Rights.

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What’s happening?

The Trump administration claims that the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—more accurately described as the Silencing American Voters Act—would keep noncitizens from voting, an exceedingly rare phenomenon that is already illegal. Rather than solving any real problem, the bill—which is sponsored by congressional Republicans—could endanger the voting rights of millions of law-abiding Americans.

What’s the big picture?

During the 2024 election, Trump and his allies pushed the baseless claim that undocumented immigrants were coming to the United States to vote in federal elections and that Democrats were encouraging them to do so. This was also part of Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election. In fact, audits of voter rolls in states such as Georgia in 2024 showed that noncitizen voting was “vanishingly rare”—0.000001 of all votes cast—and a comprehensive analysis of dozens states in 2016 similarly found that noncitizen voting amounted to 0.000001 of all votes cast; in other words, American citizens constitute 99.9999% of all votes cast.

This reality has not stopped congressional Republicans from pushing this red herring to promote legislation that would disenfranchise voters—and disproportionately impact low-income Americans and citizens of minority ethnicities. In January, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) reintroduced H.R. 22, which would require first-time voters (as well as those re-registering) to prove that they are citizens. The bill effectively assumes that every American is ineligible to vote unless and until they prove otherwise.

How would the SAVE Act actually restrict voting rights?

• The SAVE Act would presume that all Americans are not eligible to vote until they newly prove their citizenship.

• It would also harm Americans by making it easier to disenfranchise millions of voters, such as people who changed their names when they got married and those whose names were changed after they were adopted, if their last names do not match their birth certificates—even if they have other valid state-issued IDs.

• The bill would harm rural Americans and others who might have to travel long distances to prove their identity and eligibility to vote.

Right-wing activists claim to be concerned about voting by immigrants, who could face criminal charges and deportation if they voted illegally, but their tactics are designed to make it harder for ordinary Americans to vote. Through obstacles like the SAVE Act, they are also attempting to manufacture a basis for potential litigation to try to disqualify voters when the GOP loses elections, like the GOP is attempting in the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court election, where they are trying to cancel the votes of more than 60,000 Americans. Through the SAVE Act and more, right-wing funders and their front groups are spending vast sums to make it harder for Americans to vote, everywhere—even in states that the GOP does not control.

What’s the backstory?

The SAVE Act is merely the latest move in a decadeslong campaign to limit Americans’ access to the fundamental franchise. Leonard Leo, the judicial kingmaker who facilitated the Roberts Court’s near-elimination of the Voting Rights Act, sits at the center of the legal and political network driving this campaign. Two of the key groups that have provided cover for Trump’s lies about the 2020 election—and helped secure changes to state voting rights laws that Trump outlined on January 6, 2021—are the “Honest Elections Project” and “Honest Elections Project Action” (HEPA). HEPA is one of several aliases—or “fictitious names”—used by the “Judicial Crisis Network”/JCN, the group Leo deployed to capture the U.S. Supreme Court.

Leo works closely with Tyler Green, a lawyer who has assailed voting rights—for example, by unsuccessfully urging a court to strip thousands of low-income Americans of their voter registrations in Arizona in 2022. Leo chose Green to be one of his co-trustees of the Marble Freedom Trust, the $1 billion-plus “social welfare organization” Leo quietly opened after securing the largest know dark-money donation in U.S. history from Chicago industrialist Barre Seid.

Green and Leo are so close that Marble Freedom Trust’s first address was Green’s home. Green’s law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, has represented Honest Elections Project in legal filings that sought to undermine the National Voting Registration Act and Voting Rights Act, and was tied to Alabama’s efforts to defy a Supreme Court ruling striking down the state’s unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Leo’s groups also gave more than $1 million to the Tea Party Patriots in the years after the group’s leader, Cleta Mitchell, unsuccessfully tried to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” 11,000 Republican votes for Trump in 2020.

Why does restricting access to the right to vote matter?

Voting is a vital tool for protecting our rights and expanding our opportunities as a free people—a fundamental freedom that people have died to secure. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by President Johnson, he observed that “[t]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

As Donald Trump ushers America into autocracy, the SAVE Act represents yet another move by his enablers to entrench their grip on power by making it harder for Americans to vote. At least one in 10 voting-age Americans (or 21.3 million people) either do not have documentation that proves their citizenship—like a passport or a certified birth certificate—or do not have easy access to those materials, as NPR reported.

What can you do?

• Contact your members of Congress and tell them to stand against the SAVE Act and protect Americans’ freedoms, rights, and political power.

  • Find your representative’s contact information here.

  • Find your senator’s contact information here.

  • Learn more from Indivisible about how to make your voice heard by attending and speaking at town halls.

• Share resources on the SAVE Act and the harms it would cause from the Center for American Progress, NPR, the Brennan Center, the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and Common Cause.

• Make sure you’re registered to vote—and tell your family and friends to register too.

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