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The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies’ top priority, has officially failed in the Senate.
The measure was voted on Thursday as an amendment as part of lengthy debate over an immigration funding package. The election bill has languished in the Senate for months, after the House passed a version in February on a near party-line vote.
The election proposal would have taken effect immediately, even as voting is underway in congressional primaries.
Notably, the legislation would have required voters to show a document proving their U.S. citizenship, like a passport or a birth certificate, when they registered to vote.
Research has shown millions of Americans don’t have easy access to those documents. And experts say such a provision is unnecessary, as noncitizens have never been shown to vote at anything but microscopic numbers in American elections.
“The alleged sin that it is trying to correct happens so infrequently that it really does seem like the solution would be much, much worse than the disease,” said Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, in an interview with NPR this spring.
Still, as Trump has continued his years-long campaign to sow doubt in American elections, he pitched the SAVE America Act as a panacea to the fraud he falsely claims is rampant.
“Congress should unite and enact this common-sense, country-saving legislation right now and it should be before anything else happens,” Trump said during his State of the Union address. He went on to say the only reason Democrats opposed the legislation was because they want to cheat.
Trump posted frequently online about the bill as well — including on Thursday afternoon — saying at one point that he would not sign any other legislation before the SAVE Act was passed, that it “supersedes everything else.”
Taking that cue, some Republicans talked of wanting to abolish or circumvent the legislative filibuster to make it harder for Democrats to stymie the legislation. But it was clear to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., that there wasn’t a broad enough appetite among his Republican colleagues for that.
“It’s about the votes. It’s about the math,” Thune had told reporters. “And I’m — for better or worse — I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist about what we can achieve here.”
The act would have also required all voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot. And it would have mandated that all states submit their voter lists to a Department of Homeland Security tool that has been found to erroneously flag U.S. citizens.
Traditionally, Republicans have been staunchly opposed to any legislation that would nationalize how voting is done.
But Trump has openly said he thinks the U.S. should nationalize voting, and University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller noted that the SAVE America Act, had it been enacted, would have been “among the most significant nationalization[s] of elections in American history.”
That could end up being the act’s legacy, Muller wrote in a blog post in March.
“It does strike me that the debate has shifted from whether to nationalize elections to how, at least for many Republicans,” Muller wrote. “And that may well–even in failure to pass the Act!–make the conversation for Democrats next time they are in power much easier to have.”
