Yesterday, a group of conservative members of Congress announced their support for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, legislation led by Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) in the House and Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) in the Senate. If passed the bill would require proof of American citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
In a statement released to CHQ Rep. Roy said the American people deserve an election system they can trust - an election system that guarantees that only legal votes are cast toward electing public officials. Recently, in at least six battleground states, profound questions have been raised about the legality and constitutionality of many voting laws. Many states have worked to relax voting standards, calling even obvious integrity practices "voter suppression." This is a problem for many reasons, but specifically to ensure only legal U.S. citizens - whether naturalized or through birth - are voting in U.S. elections.
The bill number for the House version is H.R. 8281.
Verifying citizenship in elections should be a priority for all states. The federal form to register to vote doesn't require documentation to prove citizenship, but rather just that applicants registering to vote must "attest to being citizens." Some states look at driver's license records to see whether any noncitizens registered to vote. But driver's license records can often be outdated and may not indicate if an individual is a naturalized citizen.
While Congress has only a narrow role in the election process according to the Constitution, it can ensure that States that believe in election integrity have access to the information they need to secure their election registration rolls.
Specifically, the Protecting American Voters Act:
* Allows such information as may be necessary to enable state officials with the ability to verify that an applicant for voter registration in federal elections is a citizen of the United States.
* Requires the Department of Homeland Security to provide, without a fee, inquiring states with information from the "SAVE system" which houses data providing for who is a naturalized citizen of the United States.
* Requires the Social Security Administration to provide inquiring states with social security information (confidentiality safeguards required) that provides for who is a citizen born in the United States.
* Allows for proactive use to check individuals registering to vote and allows for retroactive purposes in order to allow states to clean out their current voter registration rolls.
Joining the announcement press conference Speaker Mike Johnson warned that a "dangerously high number" of illegal immigrants are able to vote in U.S. elections and said it could even affect who wins or loses.
"Due to the wide open border that the Biden administration has refused to close, in fact, that they engineered to open, we now have so many non-citizens in the country that if only one out of 100 of those voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes," Johnson said, according to reporting by FOX News.
"And since our elections are so razor-thin… and a few states decide the makeup of Congress and who is elected to the White House, this is a dangerously high number, and it is a great concern to millions and millions of Americans. It could obviously change the outcome of our elections."
"States are not allowed right now to prove if somebody claims on that simple form that they're a citizen, they can vote. They're not allowed to prove whether it's true or not. We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it's not been something that is easily provable," Johnson said, according to the FOX report. "We don't have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. It will prevent that from happening."
"We're here for the simple proposition supported by the vast majority of the American people, that only citizens of the United States should vote. That we should have documentary proof. That we should have a system to guarantee that only citizens of the United States vote in federal elections," Roy said according to reporting by Elizabeth Elkind.
"It is true that [President Joe] Biden has welcomed millions and millions of illegal aliens, including sophisticated criminal syndicates and agents of adversarial governments, into our borders and even on humanitarian parole," Speaker Johnson said according to NewsMax. "It is true that a growing number of localities are blurring the lines for noncitizens by allowing them to vote in municipal elections [and] it is true that Democrats have expressed a desire to turn non-citizens into voters."
The Capitol Switchboard is (202-224-3121), call your Senators and Representative TODAY to demand that they co-sponsor and vote for the SAVE Act.
Congress
Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act
Speaker Mike Johnson
citizenship to vote
voting laws
Rep. Chip Roy
H.R 8281
voter lists
federal spending
Republican majority
national debt
continuing resolution
omnibus appropriations bill
regular order
PAYGO rules
Senator Rand Paul
Waive reading of the bill