The SAVE Act Is a Systematic Plan to Suppress the Vote

I am writing to urge you to oppose the SAVE Act (H.R. 22 / S. 128) and any expanded version, including a so-called “SAVE Act Plus” or “Super SAVE Act.” This legislation is not about election security. It is a coordinated effort to suppress lawful voters by turning registration into a bureaucratic obstacle course. First, the SAVE Act creates paperwork traps that silently disenfranchise eligible voters. By requiring documentary proof of citizenship, the bill makes voter registration fragile and failure-prone. Millions of married women have changed their last names, meaning their current legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate. Under this bill, those women could be denied registration unless they can locate and present additional documents. The same risk applies to voters who move, update their registration, or experience ordinary life changes. Voting should not hinge on flawless paperwork. Second, the SAVE Act would eliminate or severely disrupt modern voter registration. Online registration, mail-in registration, automatic registration, and voter registration drives rely on streamlined systems that cannot easily collect or verify citizenship documents. In practice, this bill would force many Americans to register in person, rolling back decades of progress and disproportionately harming rural voters, disabled voters, students, seniors, and working Americans with limited access to government offices. Third, the legislation weaponizes fear and enforcement. The SAVE Act imposes criminal penalties on election officials who process registrations without the required documentation—even when applicants are eligible voters. It also invites private lawsuits against local officials accused of insufficient enforcement. This creates a chilling effect in which election administrators are incentivized to reject valid registrations rather than risk prosecution or litigation. When officials are afraid to register voters, democracy suffers. Fourth, expanded versions of the SAVE Act envision aggressive voter roll purges and sweeping data collection. These proposals would require states to identify and remove alleged non-citizens from voter rolls using error-prone databases that have repeatedly led to eligible voters being wrongly removed. Voting rights organizations warn that Native American, Alaska Native, and rural voters—many of whom live far from document-issuing offices—would be especially burdened by new in-person documentation requirements. Although the Senate previously stopped the SAVE Act, Donald Trump and his allies are escalating pressure to revive it in a more extreme form. Some supporters have openly discussed attaching the bill to must-pass legislation, while others have suggested dismantling long-standing Senate rules in order to force it through. This is not democratic reform—it is an attempt to change the rules because they cannot win under the current ones. Voter suppression is not always loud. Often, it works through inconvenience, confusion, and quiet disqualification—ensuring voters only discover the problem when it is too late. I urge you to: 1. Publicly oppose the SAVE Act and any expanded version. 2. Refuse to allow voter suppression measures to be attached to must-pass legislation. 3. Hold hearings on the real-world disenfranchisement these proposals would cause. 4. Support policies that expand access to the ballot, rather than restrict it. Our democracy depends on participation, not paperwork traps.