1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to oppose the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), which would require documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration. This legislation addresses a problem that comprehensive investigations have repeatedly shown does not exist at any meaningful scale. A Carnegie-Knight News21 investigation reviewed 2,068 alleged election fraud cases across all 50 states between 2000 and 2012 and found only ten cases of voter impersonation. The Washington Post identified approximately 31 credible cases of in-person impersonation out of more than one billion ballots cast nationwide, yielding an incidence rate measured in billionths. Even the Republican National Lawyers Association's data from 2000-2010 found that thirty states plus the District of Columbia had three or fewer fraud convictions over an entire decade, with many involving registration irregularities rather than impersonation. Federal courts have examined this issue extensively under oath with expert testimony. In Veasey v. Abbott, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found no meaningful evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud sufficient to justify the burdens imposed by strict identification requirements. The court documented that African American and Latino voters were disproportionately less likely to possess required identification and faced layered barriers including travel distances to issuing offices, fees for underlying documents, bureaucratic correction procedures, and limited office hours. The SAVE Act would nationalize these burdensome requirements by mandating presentation of a REAL ID reflecting citizenship, passport, military documentation, or government-issued photo ID paired with a certified birth certificate. Courts have found that significant numbers of eligible voters lack these documents and cannot obtain them with reasonable effort. Naturalized citizens may not have original naturalization certificates readily available. Elderly citizens born before uniform hospital documentation may lack easily retrievable birth records. Married women whose legal names differ from birth certificates face documentation mismatches. When legislation expands while the underlying harm shrinks toward zero, the stated justification loses credibility. I urge you to oppose the SAVE Act and protect the voting rights of eligible citizens who would face concrete barriers to registration while addressing a problem that does not exist in empirical reality.