Imagine if you couldn’t vote – just because you don’t have a passport or changed your last name when you got married.
That’s exactly the scenario that the vote suppressors backing the save Act are creating. Proponents of this bill are pushing false claims about voter fraud to disenfranchise countless eligible voters by requiring citizenship documentation just to register to vote.
This bill is up for a vote as soon as this week – and Congress can’t strip away our right to vote like this. Tell your representatives: Vote no on the save Act and defend our democracy.
At least 21 million eligible voters do not have easy access to the kind of documentation this bill requires – and for anyone who’s gone through a name change, including trans people and married people who changed their name, this hurdle is even higher.
As if it weren’t enough to keep people from registering to vote, this bill would also require faulty voter roll purges, taking countless eligible, registered voters off the rolls.
We’ve already seen the impact of legislation like this. When Kansas passed a similar bill over a decade ago, over 30,000 eligible voters were disenfranchised before the courts finally struck it down as unconstitutional. We know how this goes – but if we don’t act now, we’re doomed to repeat this on a nationwide scale.
Together,
Xavier Persad
Pronouns: He, him, his
Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU National Political Advocacy Division
American Civil Liberties Union
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004, USA