SAVE Act’s burden may fall on citizens, too

Legislation born of fear or suspicion deserves more scrutiny than the ordinary ins and outs of government.

The greater the claimed threat, the more important it becomes to slow down and ask some basic questions: Is the threat real? How widespread is it? Is the proposed solution proportional to the problem? What happens when a law written in the clean language of legislation collides with the complicated lives of ordinary people?

The SAVE Act is one of those laws.

Its premise is simple enough: Only American citizens should vote in American elections. There should be little disagreement on that point. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Authorities should investigate knowing violations and prosecute them when warranted.

But serious scrutiny should not end there. It should begin there.

The question raised by the SAVE Act is not whether citizenship should be required to vote. It already is. The harder question is what the government may reasonably require of millions of lawful citizens to prove their citizenship before allowing them to exercise one of the most fundamental rights in our system of government.

The right to vote belongs to the citizen. A document proves citizenship. It does not create it.

A citizen who cannot immediately find a certified birth certificate is still a citizen. A married woman whose name no longer matches the one on a birth certificate issued decades ago is still a citizen. A young man registering to vote for the first time who has a driver’s license but no passport is still a citizen. So are an elderly Alabamian whose birth records may be difficult to obtain and a working person who moves and needs to update a voter registration.

Even an Alabama STAR ID—the state’s federally compliant REAL ID—is not automatically proof of U.S. citizenship under the legislation.

Some people who encounter these hurdles will be Republicans. Some will be Democrats. Some will be independents. Some voted for Donald Trump. Some voted for Kamala Harris. Some probably did not vote at all.

Citizenship has no party registration. Neither does bureaucracy.

Available research indicates that noncitizen voting occurs but is rare. That does not mean the government should ignore it. Authorities should enforce election laws, and people who knowingly violate them should face the consequences.

But scale matters when the government proposes a major new requirement.

A Brennan Center review of the 2016 election examined 42 jurisdictions representing 23.5 million votes and identified about 30 suspected instances of noncitizen voting. State and independent reviews also have found relatively few cases.

That does not prove the problem is nonexistent. It does raise a legitimate question of proportionality: How large a burden should the government place on millions of lawful citizens to prevent conduct that available evidence indicates occurs infrequently?

Alabama offers a useful way to understand the potential consequences.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, Alabama has about 3.9 million citizens age 18 and older. National research from the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement found that about 9% of adult American citizens do not have documentary proof of citizenship readily available.

Applied cautiously to Alabama, that would amount to about 350,000 citizens.

That is an estimate, not an Alabama-specific count. It does not mean 350,000 Alabamians would lose the right to vote, nor does it mean they cannot prove their citizenship. Many undoubtedly could locate or obtain the required documents.

But 350,000 is a large enough number to demand attention. It suggests that producing documentary proof of citizenship may not be nearly as simple for many lawful Alabama citizens as the political debate makes it sound.

There also is the question of time. With the midterm elections approaching, significant new federal voting requirements would force state and local election officials to change procedures, train workers and explain the new rules to voters. Whatever the legislation’s merits, implementation carries consequences. Mistakes made in haste could undermine the confidence in elections that the law is intended to protect.

Lawmakers should examine those potential consequences before changing the rules governing voter registration.

Alabama’s Republican congressional delegation supports proof-of-citizenship legislation. Senators Katie Britt, R-Alabama, and Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, have signed on as cosponsors of Senate legislation, and the state’s Republican members of the U.S. House have supported the effort.

They may sincerely believe these measures are necessary to protect election integrity. That is a legitimate position. But sincerity of purpose does not relieve lawmakers of their responsibility to examine the consequences. That principle applies equally to Democrats and Republicans.

The debate has moved beyond the SAVE Act itself. Some are pressuring the Senate to weaken or eliminate the filibuster to advance the legislation, a step Republican leaders have resisted so far. Such a change would reach far beyond one election bill. Altering the Senate’s rules for an immediate political victory would give the same power to the next majority, whether Republican or Democratic. That, too, is a consequence worth considering before urgency becomes an excuse for permanently changing institutions.

Whenever politicians tell us legislation is obvious, simple or urgently necessary, citizens should become more attentive—not less.

History is filled with laws passed in response to fear—fear of crime, terrorism, outsiders, economic collapse or institutions believed to be failing. Sometimes those fears are justified. Sometimes government action is necessary.

But fear is not evidence, and good intentions do not guarantee good law.

Lawmakers are responsible not only for identifying something that might go wrong but also for determining whether their proposed solution would create unnecessary problems for innocent people.

Consider the young Alabama voter who cannot locate his birth certificate, the woman whose legal name has changed since birth, the rural voter who has never needed a passport or the citizen who has voted legally for decades but moves and must update a voter registration.

The law does not stand in line at a government office, search through an old filing cabinet or try to obtain a birth certificate from another state.

People do.

When the government places a new requirement between citizens and the exercise of a fundamental right, those practical realities matter.

None of this means election integrity is unimportant. The government has a responsibility to ensure elections are conducted lawfully and only eligible citizens vote. It also has a responsibility to ensure eligible citizens are not unnecessarily prevented from participating.

Those responsibilities should coexist.

The real test of an election law is not whether it makes voting as easy or as difficult as possible. The test is whether the law protects the ballot’s integrity without placing an unnecessary burden on the citizen entitled to cast it.

That balance deserves more than slogans. It deserves evidence, deliberation and an honest accounting of who will bear the burden when the government acts.

The SAVE Act may become law. It may change before it does. But the questions it raises are larger than a single piece of legislation.

In a democratic republic, we should protect our elections. We also should protect the citizens whose voices give those elections meaning.

Before we celebrate what a law promises to prevent, we should understand what it may require of the innocent people who must live under it.

That is not a Republican principle or a Democratic principle.

It is a principle of self-government.