Cleaver: SAVE Act would make voting ‘significantly harder for tens of millions of Americans’ | Opinion
A few things to keep in mind, in case you’ve been too stressed to keep up lately: Our most steadfast allies, like our friends in Canada, are suddenly the bad guys, don’t ask why, and tanking the global economy will somehow lead to a boom. “The operation is over! The patient lived, and is healing,” Donald Trump wrote in defending his market-crashing tariffs, as if surgery for cancer you never had in the first place were widely recommended.
More handy notes: Retirement is for lazybones, so who needs that Ponzi scheme known as Social Security? A fired federal employee who’d worked for the disabled and had the temerity to ask a congressman who was going to provide those services now was clearly a “far-left activist” — or else would have known to save his questions for the next town hall, hehehe. Also, up is down, and something called the SAVE Act is going to make voting safer by requiring voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections.
In reality, the so-called SAVE Act — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which the House is supposed to vote on Thursday — would do no such thing, but would on the contrary make it harder for many American citizens to cast a ballot. Why is this a goal, you ask?
This particular wrong is at least more logical than accidentally firing top NIH research scientists, intentionally booting VA crisis line employees, cutting vaccine funding in the middle of a Kansas measles outbreak, and so many other actions that help no one. Because by the numbers, making it harder for women and minorities to vote does help Republicans more than it will hurt them. (Sorry, GOP ladies and voters of color.)
In an interview, Kansas City Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II had a lot to say about why he’ll be voting no. First, because the whole “voter integrity” pitch is a sham: “It was not designed to make voting easier, but significantly harder for tens of millions of Americans.”
That is, for certain Americans, and not noncitizens, who are already barred from voting. There are criminal penalties for doing so anyway. Those penalties are enforced, and for anyone who ever hopes to gain citizenship, they are an effective deterrent.
Again and again, noncitizen voting has been shown to be exceedingly rare, which Kris Kobach proved when he tried to go after this nonexistent problem in Kansas and then across the country.
So what’s the problem with the SAVE Act? It’s that many U.S. citizens simply do not have easy access to the documents you’d need to vote under this bill.
Cleaver’s father, for example, who died in Kansas City at age 101 in December, didn’t have a birth certificate, and that’s the case for a lot of older Black Americans in particular. “My older sister was the first African American born in a hospital in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1943, and there was a newspaper article on it, it was such a big deal.”
Half of US citizens don’t have passport
About 1 in 10 U.S. citizens does not have proof of citizenship, according to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. Half of us don’t have a passport.
There are also 69 million women who do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name, so that puts an extra burden on them. Good luck, mesdames.
The SAVE Act “creates more bureaucracy” too, Cleaver said. Missouri counties would have to come up with an extra registration form — one for federal and one for non-federal elections — yet the legislation doesn’t fund the extra work that would create. Remember when Republicans wanted less red tape? That’s what they said, anyway.
The SAVE Act also makes voting more expensive, since it could necessitate spending $100 to get a passport. In that way, the congressman said, “it’s no different from a poll tax” that so shamefully kept Black Americans from voting.
“There’s intentionality” to the bill, he said. “They say you have to have to show ID when you board a plane or buy alcohol, but it’s not the same.”
This reminds Cleaver, he said, of the 2012 Kansas law banning sharia law “when there were two Muslims in the whole state.” Another pretend problem, in other words, solved by another pretend solution.
Under SAVE, if you moved even across the street, Cleaver said, you’d have to travel in person to re-register to vote. And who is least likely to be able to do that? The disabled, elderly and those without means.
Also, if SAVE becomes law, election officials will be criminally liable for accidentally signing up a voter who has no proper proof of citizenship. So on top of all the partisan nightmares these nonpartisan public servants have had to endure in recent years, they need this?
Republicans are set to pass this law in the House this week, but it is unfair, deceptive, and will cause problems for Americans across the ideological spectrum.
You don’t need to call Congressman Cleaver other than to say thank you, but do call your Republican representatives to ask them to say no to this kind of “election integrity.”
This story was originally published April 9, 2025 at 12:56 PM.
