The SAVE Act Threatens American Democracy

from Nisha Anand, CEO of Dream.Org

Dream.Org was founded on a simple belief, democracy works when we work together. For years we have worked with leaders across political lines and communities across cultures to prove that when we confront difficult issues together, we can design better systems that are fair and effective for everyone. That is democracy in action. 

The SAVE Act threatens both American democracy and conservative principles: the preservation of federalism, state’s rights, and safeguards against hoarded concentrations of power in Congress. This bill would:

• Make it significantly harder for millions of American citizens to register to vote by requiring very specific documents, such as a passport or an original copy of their birth certificate when registering to vote or updating their voter registration.
• End online voter registration, making it almost impossible for 60 million rural Americans who rely on remote voter registration and mail-in voter registration to have their voices heard 
• Burden military voters by requiring military service records that show they were born in the U.S., which excludes military members born overseas from registering to vote
• Allow purges of eligible voter status based on faulty sources of citizenship information, including state agency databases that may contain outdated citizenship data with no notification requirements

More than half of American citizens do not have passports, including elderly Americans, who are the least likely to have passports. Many other Americans do not readily have access to their birth certificates, including millions of married women who do not have birth certificates with their current legal names, and survivors of natural disasters. Election integrity is critical, but we can secure our elections without creating new barriers to voter registration for millions of otherwise eligible Americans. 

We believe in finding common ground solutions to the nation’s most pressing challenges. But legislation that makes voting, the foundation of our democracy, more challenging, calls into question our ability to come together on all other issues. 

We urge the Senate to vote NO on the SAVE Act to uphold America’s constitutional principles, defend state authority, and ensure that efforts to strengthen our elections do not weaken American democracy itself.