The SAVE America Act was voted on as an amendment to an immigration funding bill in the Senate on Thursday, after months of stalling. The legislation would have taken effect immediately, even as congressional primaries are underway across the country. The House had passed its version in February on a near party-line vote.
The central provision of the bill would have required voters to show a document proving U.S. citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — when they register to vote. It would also have mandated that all voters present photo identification to cast a ballot, and that states submit their voter lists to a Department of Homeland Security tool that has been found to erroneously flag U.S. citizens.
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck described the measure as a solution in search of a problem. “The alleged sin that it is trying to correct happens so infrequently that it really does seem like the solution would be much, much worse than the disease,” Vladeck told NPR in the spring.
Research has shown that millions of Americans do not have easy access to passport or birth certificate documents, and experts say noncitizen voting has never been shown to occur at anything but extremely low rates in American elections.
Trump had pushed the bill aggressively. During his State of the Union address, he said, “Congress should unite and enact this common-sense, country-saving legislation right now and it should be before anything else happens.” He also said the only reason Democrats opposed the legislation was because they want to cheat. On Thursday afternoon, Trump posted online that he would not sign any other legislation before the SAVE Act passed, calling it his “supersedes everything else” priority.
Some Senate Republicans responded by advocating to abolish or circumvent the legislative filibuster to make it harder for Democrats to block the bill. But Thune rejected that approach. “It’s about the votes. It’s about the math,” Thune told reporters. “And I’m — for better or worse — I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist about what we can achieve here.”
University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller noted that the legislation would have represented a dramatic shift in how elections are administered. “It does strike me that the debate has shifted from whether to nationalize elections to how, at least for many Republicans,” Muller wrote in a blog post in March. He called the bill “among the most significant nationalization[s] of elections in American history.”
Traditionally, Republicans have been staunchly opposed to nationalizing election administration, which has been left primarily to the states. Muller observed that even in failure, the bill’s push may shift the conversation for Democrats when they next hold power, making nationalization easier to pursue.