What is the SAVE Act?

• The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, aka HR 22, is a bill in the US Congress that would require every American to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections or change or update their voter registration, which would need to be presented in person.

Why is the SAVE Act bad?

• To start, these requirements are wholly unnecessary, as citizenship is already verified by election officials before voter granting eligibility, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare. But the real issue is that very few kinds of documentation meet the “documentary proof of citizenship” definition; the document needs to show citizenship on its face. In all but 5 states (Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington), REAL ID cards don’t do this, nor do most other forms of ID. For the majority of Americans, documentation would be limited to birth certificates, passports, and naturalization papers.

• If an eligible voter doesn’t have a passport and their name doesn’t match their birth certificate or naturalization papers, the law tells the states to figure out their own system for verifying citizenship. What that would actually look like is unknown, which is scary. A state could decide a marriage certificate showing the eligible voter’s name change in concert with their birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship– that kind of ambiguity makes room for policies that could make proving citizenship almost impossible for many. And it can take a long time to put new election laws into place at the state level, so what happens if there’s an election before a state passes new laws? Countless Ohioans could be denied their constitutional right to vote.

• If the SAVE Act becomes law, eligible voters can only register or re-register in person, and only election officials would be able to register or re-register them. This would ban eligible voters from registering or updating their voter registration by mail, through community registration drives, at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), or anywhere else election officials were not. In addition to severely limiting Ohioans’ opportunities to vote, this would also place an extraordinary burden on our election system, which does not have the capacity to verify citizenship eligibility in person for thousands and thousands of Ohioans. If SAVE was passed into law today, the only place in Ohio where people could register or re-register would be county boards of elections, and Ohio has only one per county.

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See more about the millions of Ohioans who would be impacted if the SAVE Act came into law here. 

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Tell your US House member and Ohio Senators Moreno and Husted to OPPOSE the SAVE Act here.