The SAVE Act Won’t Save Anyone.

Can we sit with this for a minute?

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

I know people who support the SAVE Act. They care about elections in the U.S. They want things to feel fair and secure. That makes sense. Wanting secure elections isn’t extreme. It sounds responsible.

So let’s take that concern seriously.

The SAVE Act would require people to show documentary proof of citizenship — like a passport or certified birth certificate — in order to register to vote in federal elections. The goal, supporters say, is to stop noncitizens from voting.

That raises a very sincere question:

Is noncitizen voting happening at a scale that threatens our election outcomes?

The best evidence we have says no.

The nonpartisan Brookings Institution looked at decades of data. In Arizona, across 25 years and more than 42 million ballots, they found 36 cases of fraud — none of which changed outcomes. In Pennsylvania, over 30 years and across more than 100 million ballots, they found 39 cases.

The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation maintains an ongoing Election Fraud Database — a collection of documented election-fraud cases that resulted in convictions or official findings. As of its most recent reports, that database includes over 1,400 proven instances of election fraud that have occurred across the U.S. over several decades.

The Brennan Center for Justice reviewed data across multiple states and found voter fraud rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.

These numbers might be hard to picture or feel, so let’s break it down.

0.025% is about 1 out of 40,000 votes.

0.0003% is about 1 out of 333,000 votes.

Imagine a football stadium holding 40,000 people. The higher end of that range — 0.0025% — would mean you find one fraudulent vote in that entire crowd.

At the lower end (0.0003%), you’d need more than eight completely full 40,000-seat stadiums before statistically expecting to find one fraudulent vote.

Scan the faces. Tens of thousands of people. Then hundreds of thousands.

One case.

That’s the scale we’re talking about. Fraud isn’t zero. But it is extraordinarily rare — and not at levels shown to change election outcomes.

So here’s the question that keeps tugging at me:

If something is happening at that scale, what kind of response is proportionate?

Because the proposed solution doesn’t just target a handful of bad actors. It would require millions of eligible voters to produce documents many don’t readily have.

Roughly half of Americans do not hold a valid passport, based on U.S. State Department passport issuance numbers compared to total population. Getting a certified birth certificate can involve fees, travel, time off work, and navigating bureaucracy. For some that’s a small inconvenience. For others — especially low-income voters, rural residents, elderly people, and married women whose legal names no longer match their birth certificates — it’s a real barrier.

And when access becomes harder, participation shrinks. That shrinking isn’t new.

From the beginning, political belonging in this country was explicitly tied to whiteness. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons.” Power and whiteness were woven together from the start.

After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment (1870) said states could not deny the vote based on race. On paper, that expanded democracy. In practice, many states — led by white lawmakers — created new barriers. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that protected poor white voters while excluding formerly enslaved black Americans.

Access expanded. Restrictions adapted.

When women won the right to vote through the 19th Amendment (1920), the amendment prohibited discrimination based on sex — but it did not override Jim Crow laws. Black women in the South still faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation.

When Native Americans were granted citizenship under the Indian Citizenship Act (1924), many states continued preventing them from voting through residency rules, literacy tests, and claims that they were “under guardianship.”

Then came the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to dismantle racial discrimination in voting. It worked. Black voter registration surged across the South.

And again, resistance followed. In the decades after, states implemented measures such as at-large election systems that diluted minority voting power, aggressive voter roll purges, reductions in early voting, and strict voter ID laws.

A major turning point came in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, removing the criteria that certain states with histories of discrimination get federal approval before changing voting laws. Within hours and days of that ruling, several states moved forward with previously blocked voter ID laws and other restrictions.

Each time access expanded — especially across racial lines — new rules emerged that narrowed it again.

Sometimes those restrictions were blunt and explicit. Other times they were framed in neutral language — protecting integrity, preventing fraud, ensuring order.

But the pattern is consistent.

And this is where we need to keep whiteness as part of the conversation — as a system that has historically defined who fully belongs and who must prove they belong. A gatekeeper that quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, shapes policy.

Today, as the electorate becomes more multiracial, stories about “illegals voting” seem to surge — despite a lack of evidence that noncitizen voting is widespread. Research has found that perceptions of voter fraud are more strongly associated with racial resentment and demographic anxiety than with actual fraud rates.

This doesn’t mean that everyone worried about election security is motivated by racism. Most people I know seem to genuinely want fairness.

But it is an invitation to reflect. A call for us to look at what could be driving the fear around voter fraud.

Are we responding to evidence?

Or are we responding to fear?

Are we solving a documented problem?

Or protecting a story about who we think belongs?

If we love democracy — and I believe many of us do — we can hold two truths at once:

Elections should be secure.

And participation should be accessible.

Those are not enemies.

The long arc of voting rights in this country has bent toward inclusion — through amendments, organizing, protest, and courage. Again and again, the circle widened. And again and again, there were efforts to tighten it.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s a recurring feature of U.S. democracy.

And if we’re honest, I think we have to ask: when new restrictions — like the SAVE Act — are proposed today, are we stepping into that same pattern?

We’re not asking this to shame or divide. But to remember the pattern we’re part of.

Will we let unproven fears guide us?

Or will we let evidence — and an honest reckoning with our history — guide us instead?

And maybe the first step isn’t policy at all.

Maybe it’s being willing to reexamine the stories we‘ve inherited — together.