WASHINGTON, DC – A bill in Congress that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote, if enacted, would devastate voter registration and disenfranchising tens of millions of eligible American citizens, according to the Brennan Center.
The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act “show-your-papers requirement is not just limited to new registrations but rather applies to every “application to register to vote,” which in many jurisdictions includes re-registrations and changes of address,” reports the Brennan Center.
If enacted, the Brennan Center notes “the bill would obliterate or upend longstanding and popular methods of voter registration for all voters, including registration by mail, voter registration drives, online voter registration, and automatic voter registration.”
The same Brennan Center statement notes, “the bill would functionally eliminate mail registration by requiring voters registering by mail to produce citizenship documents ‘in person’ to an election official before the registration deadline” while “abolishing many or all voter registration drives and online voter registration systems, which are typically treated like mail registration.”
The Brennan Center also notes how, “in a survey conducted by the Brennan Center and partners, more than nine percent of American voting-age citizens, or 21.3 million people, don’t have a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers readily available.
Voters of color, voters who change their names (most notably, married women), and younger voters would be most significantly affected” with the new bill requirements.
The act itself “includes a provision requiring states to establish a failsafe process for those without citizenship documents to demonstrate their citizenship through ‘other evidence’ and swearing to an affidavit.
“That option is vague and severely undercut by another provision making it a crime for election officials to register any applicant who does not ‘present documentary proof of United States citizenship,’” notes the Brennan Center.
