Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, an irresponsible proposal designed to severely curb voters’ freedom to access elections.
The SAVE America Act would functionally dismantle online and mail-in voter registration, target election officials with egregious levels of civil and criminal liability, and disenfranchise millions of Americans by forcibly requiring documentary proof of citizenship and photo identification when registering to vote and when voting at the polls. Only 6% of voters currently register in person at an election office and over 146 million Americans do not currently own a passport.
In response to House passage, Legal Defense Fund Director of Policy Demetria McCain issued the following statement:
“The SAVE America Act is not about protecting our elections — it’s about disguising voter suppression techniques aimed at disenfranchising Black voters as election security. It is disingenuous, it is discriminatory, and it is all based on a continuously disproven narrative of voter fraud propagated by an administration concerned not with voter protections but solely with the fear of letting people select their own leaders.
“LDF calls upon the U.S. Senate to reject the SAVE America Act. The authoritarianism woven into this bill has no place in our elections. Instead of trying to solve a nonexistent problem, Congress must focus its attention on the affordability crisis that is decimating the livelihoods of millions of Black people and the federal encroachment on city streets.”
###
Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation’s first civil rights legal organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957, though it was founded under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall while he was at the NAACP. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) is a division of LDF that undertakes innovative research and houses LDF’s archive. In all media attributions, please refer to us as the Legal Defense Fund or LDF (do not include NAACP) and refer to the Institute as LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute or TMI.
