Andy Longo

Mikey, claiming there is “not even one” legitimate argument against the SAVE America Act is a lie. 1. Noncitizen voting in federal elections has already been illegal since 1996. Your bill does not create that prohibition. It forces eligible American citizens to prove their citizenship before registering, even though noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare and there is no evidence it has ever affected the outcome of a federal election. 2. Millions of citizens do not have the specific documents your bill demands readily available. A bipartisan analysis estimates that roughly 28.4 million voting-age citizens lack ready access to a qualifying passport or the required combination of photo identification and citizenship documents. Married women, older Americans, rural voters, low-income citizens and anyone whose current name differs from a birth certificate can face additional paperwork, fees, travel and delays. Those people are citizens, Mikey. You are making them prove it to exercise a constitutional right. Kansas already tested this garbage. Its documentary-proof requirement blocked roughly 31,000 eligible citizens from registering while addressing a noncitizen-registration rate of approximately 0.002 percent. That is voter suppression, not election security. 3. The Constitution gives states the initial responsibility for administering elections while allowing Congress to alter rules for federal elections. So Congress has authority here, but constitutional authority does not make every federal mandate wise, necessary or immune from criticism. This bill would replace state systems with a costly national mandate, threaten election officials with lawsuits and criminal penalties, and provide states no implementation funding or meaningful preparation period. 4. Requiring citizens to spend money obtaining certificates, correcting records, traveling to government offices or replacing documents before they can register creates a financial barrier to voting. Whether a court ultimately labels every such expense a poll tax is a legal question, but pretending the burden does not exist is absurd. There are plenty of legitimate arguments against the SAVE America Act. You simply cannot answer them, so you pretend they don't exist. It's not getting passed.