1. United States
2. Ark.
3. Letter

I am writing to express my strong disapproval of your support for the "Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act" (SAVE Act). While I fully agree that election integrity is vital to our democracy, this legislation is a solution in search of a problem. It imposes unnecessary burdens on eligible American voters under the guise of preventing non-citizen voting—a crime that is already illegal and statistically negligible. I admonish you to reconsider your stance on this bill. By supporting it, you are helping to propagate the dangerous and false narrative that our elections are riddled with fraud. This rhetoric undermines public trust in our democratic institutions and ignores the overwhelming consensus of data and expert analysis. The reality is that voting in the United States is secure. Stringent studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud, including non-citizen voting, is vanishingly rare: The Brennan Center for Justice conducted a comprehensive review of elections that had been meticulously studied for fraud, finding incident rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%. They noted that an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate another voter at the polls. A major study published by The Washington Post found only 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014. Even the database maintained by the Heritage Foundation—often cited by proponents of stricter voting laws—identifies only a handful of cases of in-person impersonation fraud over decades of elections involving billions of votes. The SAVE Act does not make our elections safer; it makes them less accessible. By requiring documentary proof of citizenship (such as a passport or birth certificate) for federal registration, this bill threatens to disenfranchise millions of eligible citizens who do not have ready access to these documents. This burden falls disproportionately on low-income voters, rural residents, and married women whose current legal names may not match their birth certificates. Furthermore, it is already a federal crime for non-citizens to vote, punishable by prison, fines, and deportation. Our current system of swearing citizenship under penalty of perjury has worked effectively for decades. I urge you to stop supporting legislation that solves no real problem while creating significant barriers for legitimate voters. Please focus your efforts on making voting more accessible to your constituents, not harder.