Mike reported back regarding the SAVE Act before the event on May 23, 2026. View the May 23 argument report here.
The SAVE Act came up during the event on April 18, 2026. View the April 18 argument report here.
SAVE Act
{Main source: Most of what follows comes from a Politifact article, “Voter suppression or little step” by Amy Sherman, March 19, 2026, which I summarized, reordered, and fleshed out implications about how the law could be weaponized.}
Key point ) SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. The Constitution tasks states, not Congress, with running elections. About two-thirds of states have laws that request or require an ID to vote; some states mandate that the ID include a photo. Other states use different verification measures.
Married women ) Married women who have changed their names from the ones on their birth certificates will be required to provide documentation about their name change or sign an affidavit to be able to vote. The SAVE Act says that in cases of such name discrepancies, states shall establish processes to provide “additional documentation as necessary to establish that the name on the documentation is a previous name of the applicant” or require the voter registration applicant to sign an affidavit attesting that the name on the documentation is the applicant’s previous name. It would add significant barriers but it’s not clear what those barriers are.
Number of votes at risk ) A 2023 Pew research survey found 79% of married women in opposite-sex marriages took their spouse’s last name. About 5% of men changed their last names after marriage. For same-sex marriages, Pew said the sample was too small to measure. So, 69 million married women (4/5 in op-sex marriages) and 4+ million men have changed their names from the ones on their birth certificates.
Potential for sowing chaos ) Trump & his appointees have repeatedly claimed that the coming mid-terms would be, in their word, “stolen” by perfidious Democrats. [Not sure how, given that Trump’s political party controls all three branches of government and a majority of state capitals.] Opponents have suggested that he’s spreading doubt now so that he can discredit election results that do not satisfy him.
How could that happen? The SAVE Act opens up at least 5 avenues for disallowing or casting doubt over millions of individual votes. Based on Trump’s past actions and threats, teams of lawyers from his DOJ and third-party groups funded by dark money could be dispatched to key battlegrounds states as the votes roll in. There they might seize ballot boxes / machines while claiming that large numbers of votes should be set aside because their validity was in question. (Earlier this year, the FBI was dispatched to Georgia on what may prove to have been a dry run or training mission for just such a scenario.)
Chaos tactic #1) SAVE Acts says that states shall establish a process of requiring “additional documentation as necessary” to show name changes, but doesn’t list the type of documentation.
>> Trump’s legal teams could object to certain types of documentation used disproportionately by opposition voters. Lawsuits would follow. No final vote count would be made for weeks or months.
Chaos tactic #2) For women who want to sign an affidavit about their name change, the SAVE Act doesn’t make clear what constitutes an adequate affidavit, e.g. whether it must be signed by a notary.
>> Trump’s legal teams could object to lack of notarization (or lack of signing witnesses or whatever) in districts dominated by unsupportive voters. Lawsuits would follow. No final vote count would be made for weeks or months.
Chaos tactic #3) The SAVE Act says that the state processes “shall be subject to any relevant guidance adopted by the Election Assistance Commission” but the guidance that the EAC provides has generally been advisory in nature. So does the SAVE Act mean that the EAC is now making rules or still just suggesting rules? The ambiguous wording means that an answer will be punted to the courts.
>> Thanks to the ambiguity created here, Trump’s legal teams could claim that EAC guidance is mandatory or that EAC guidance is merely advisory, whichever suits Trump’s electoral needs. Lawsuits would follow. No final vote count would be made for weeks or months.
Chaos tactic #4) The legislation would take effect immediately during an election year when primaries are already under way. That doesn’t leave much time for election officials to implement changes, conduct voter outreach or for women to update their registrations. So the SAVE Act creates chaos:
– Could someone considered to be properly registered to vote in the primaries one month be consider ineligible to vote in the general election in another month?
– Does a vote-by-mail by someone who doesn’t meet the new rules count if it was mailed in before the rules changed or only if the ballot was received before the rules changed?
>> Trump’s legal teams could object to to all sorts of things here. Lawsuits would follow. No final vote count would be made for weeks or months.
Chaos tactic #5) The law would impose criminal penalties for election officials who register a person to vote who failed to present documentary proof of citizenship even if that person is a U.S. citizen.
>> But with all this confusing half guidance, honest election officials will understandably be afraid of DOJ prosecution. In contrast, MAGA election officials may be confident that if they use the ambiguous / fuzzy / gray provisions against Democrats but in favor of Republications, the DOJ will have their back.
Example: NH ) One argument making the rounds on Trump-friendly media is that New Hampshire has something like this and everything is great there. New Hampshire has a proof of citizenship law already that has created obstacles for some women. MAGA pundits say that in NH local election officials may be able to help prove a voter’s qualifications by searching state records. But that is no help if the documents a voter needs are from another state. Election officials have confirmed that voters are being turned away for missing name change documentation.
– In one town, Bethlehem, over a year, the office processed about a dozen registration applications, but officials had to reject 25% of them because the applicants were women who used birth certificates with their maiden names but did not provide additional name change proof.
– In Concord, an officials turned away a recently-divorced woman who had changed back to her maiden name but didn’t have proof of the name change. But the woman’s ex-husband was still able to vote, of course.
Non-citizen suffrage in the United States
SAVE Act supporters hope that you don’t know your US history: throughout most of the nation’s past citizenship was not a requirement for voting, residency was. In other words, if you lived in a state, worked there, and paid taxes, you could vote.
What changed that was emancipation and immigration. When states where the established native (white) population felt threatened by influxes of new voters, citizen-only voter laws appeared. Blatantly, Alabama gave the vote to people of any nationality or citizenship status so long as they met one requirement: they had to be a White person.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
1875 The Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett noted that “citizenship has not in all cases been made a condition precedent to the enjoyment of the right of suffrage. Thus, in Missouri, persons of foreign birth, who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, may under certain circumstances vote.”
1926 Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections. Since the time of the founding fathers as many as 40 states allowed non-citizens to vote in elections, usually with a residency requirement ranging from a few months to a few years.
1928 was the first time in the history of the USA in which no alien in any state had the right to cast a vote for a candidate for any office – national, state, or local.
1996, The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 has prohibited non-citizens from voting in federal elections, with the threat of fines, imprisonment, inadmissibility and deportation.