Former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the SAVE America Act for requiring proof of identity when registering to vote.
Well, yes.
Requiring someone to establish that they are a U.S. citizen before being added to the voter rolls is not some hidden provision critics just uncovered.
The SAVE America Act was written to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before someone registers to vote in a federal election. Harris meant the requirement as a criticism. Supporters see it as the safeguard at the very heart of the legislation.
The timing of that criticism is particularly striking.
In recent weeks, the national debate over voter-roll eligibility has intensified. The Department of Homeland Security recently warned California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania about tens of thousands of potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.
Less than a week after DHS issued those warnings, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill acknowledged roughly 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote. He blamed it on a “software glitch.”
Calling it a software glitch may explain how it happened. It does not answer the more important question of why the system allowed it to happen in the first place.
The SAVE America Act wasn’t written because supporters believed election systems were perfect. New Jersey didn’t prove every state has the same problem. It demonstrated why supporters argue prevention is better than cleanup.
The software explanation answered one question. It raised several more.
How long had the vulnerability existed?
Why wasn’t it caught sooner?
Most importantly, why should states wait until ineligible registrations occur before verifying eligibility?
Those questions become even more significant when considering one often overlooked fact. In May, New Jersey state Sen. Jim Beach and Republican Sen. Kristin Corrado introduced bipartisan legislation to ensure individuals who indicated they were not U.S. citizens would not be prompted to register through New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission.
The proposal was simple: If someone tells the state that he or she is not a citizen, the system should not prompt that person to register to vote. It was a safeguard designed to stop an eligibility problem before a registration was ever processed.
Think about that for a second.
Lawmakers from both parties had already identified the vulnerability. The software glitch didn’t create the problem. It exposed one that legislators were already trying to fix.
That’s precisely why supporters argue safeguards belong on the front end of the registration process, not after election officials are left explaining how the problem happened.
As Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Chief National Initiatives Officer Chuck DeVore wrote in his recent research paper, How to Ensure That Only Citizens Vote, “When non-citizens vote for any reason, citizens’ votes are diluted and thus disenfranchised.”
Supporters of the SAVE America Act see the issue through that lens.
The argument is not that eligible Americans should face unnecessary barriers to voting. It is that citizenship should be established before someone is placed on the voter rolls, protecting the weight of every legally cast ballot.
That position is hardly outside the political mainstream. In fact, polling suggests the public is far less divided on election safeguards than Washington.
In a recent Fox News poll, “roughly eight in 10 registered voters favor requiring photo identification to register to vote (83%) and to cast a ballot (77%).”
These suggest many Americans believe verification is a reasonable expectation, not an extraordinary burden.
The contradictions do not stop there.
Earlier this year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated “Democrats support voter ID.” If that’s true, the rhetoric and the voting record from this past weekend’s Senate vote are difficult to square.
Every Senate Democrat voted against advancing the SAVE America Act, leaving Americans with an obvious question: If Democrats support voter verification, why oppose legislation designed to strengthen election verification?
The debate over the SAVE America Act has become strangely inverted. Critics spend their time explaining what the legislation would do. Supporters listen and wonder why those basic safeguards are supposed to be so controversial.
Kamala Harris intended to make the case against the SAVE America Act. Instead, she described exactly why it exists in the first place.
Sometimes the strongest argument for legislation comes from those trying to defeat it.
