To the editor:
How quickly could you find your birth certificate? If you have a passport, you probably know where it is, but 50% of American citizens don’t have one. If you’re a woman who changed your name when you got married, as almost 80% of women have, how long would it take you to find your marriage license? It’s not even clear at this point if that document is sufficient. A real ID driver’s license won’t serve the purpose. Only five states indicate citizenship on their licenses. If you were born in another country, but are a U.S. citizen, where do you securely keep your Naturalization papers?
What if you want to register to vote because you are or will be 18 by the next election? What if you are a newly naturalized citizen who isn’t yet registered to vote? What if you’ve finally decided to register to vote after sitting out many elections? What if you have to re-register to vote because you’ve moved, changed your name, or your party affiliation?
How would you prove that you’re an American citizen?
The House of Representatives has narrowly (220-208) passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, commonly known as the SAVE Act. It now, as of this writing, sits in the Senate, waiting to be passed and signed into law by the president. It needs 60 votes in favor to pass.
It was introduced to combat voter fraud, especially to prevent noncitizens from voting.
It is a proposed law to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for voting rights, surveyed local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, or 0.0001%.
To register to vote if the Save Act were to pass would require applicants to present their documentation in person, a great hardship for many people. It would eliminate the hard-fought ways we’ve earned by patient and persistent work over many decades to enact or change laws to make registering to vote accessible to all who are eligible. They’re the routes most people take to register to vote: “Motor Voter” registration, mail-in registration, Voter Registration Drives.
Chip Roy (R-Texas), who introduced the bill, said in a statement that the legislation provided “myriad ways for people to prove citizenship and explicitly directs States to establish a process for individuals to register to vote if there are discrepancies.”
We’ve seen that the States are not always interested in equal voting rights for all eligible voters. We’ve seen what happens when voter lists are purged hastily, often just before an election. Voters aren’t notified they’ve been removed from the voting list or not informed about what documentation they need to be reinstated.
“They are trying to take something that we all agree on — that only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections — and use that to make it harder for millions of eligible citizens to cast their vote,” Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said.
Our history is of Congress expanding the right to vote, not restricting it.
Dare we use what seems to have become somewhat of an obscenity rather than an accolade—the “b” word—to suggest that Congress could act in a bipartisan manner? Members have at least two other choices for truly fair elections and voting rights: The Freedom to Vote Act and the timely John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.
In the history of our country, the right to vote has often includes the fight to vote.
Shari Pressman
McKinley Road
