On Wednesday, President Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill that the House and Senate had passed.
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” the president posted online.
The SAVE America Act was originally called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. It has passed the House but stalled in the Senate, lacking the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. The Republican leader of the Senate, John Thune, has not been willing to get rid of the filibuster, or force senators to actually talk for days in the old style of a filibuster, in order to force a majority-vote roll call on the bill.
President Trump has argued that elections in many states, including California, are compromised by the excessive and careless use of mail ballots and by neglectfully maintained voter registration rolls.
Whether you believe he’s right or wrong, the SAVE America Act would remove some vulnerabilities to potential fraud and make it possible to prevent or detect illegal voting by ineligible people.
Only U.S. citizens may vote in U.S. elections, and the SAVE America Act would require anyone registering to vote in a federal election to provide documentary proof of citizenship. States would have to verify citizenship status, possibly against the databases of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Currently in California, citizenship is required to vote in federal, state and almost all local elections, but nobody verifies it. A person registering to vote attests on the registration form that he or she is a citizen, eligible to vote. The form is signed – or squiggled on a DMV touchscreen – under penalty of perjury, but neither the county registrars nor the Secretary of State ever check to see if it’s true. Parking meters are enforced more stringently than the citizenship requirement to vote. The SAVE America Act would fix that.
The SAVE America Act also would mandate all states to require a photo ID to vote in federal elections. Currently, 36 states require voters to present ID to vote at the polls on Election Day. Of these, 24 require an ID with a photograph and 12 don’t.
California doesn’t require any form of ID. In fact, when voters in Huntington Beach passed a charter amendment to allow the City Council to require voter ID in city elections, the state of California sued to stop it and then passed a law to make voter ID laws illegal.
Currently in California, there’s no way to prevent, detect, or prosecute voter impersonation. Earlier this year, fraudsters were recorded trying to collect signatures on a petition by paying individuals on the street to sign someone else’s name and address. Those identities came from the voter file, which is available to all campaigns, researchers and journalists who request it. The voter history is available, too, showing who votes often and who doesn’t.
If a fraudster wanted to affect the outcome of an election contest, such as a local tax measure, a copy of the voter file, a list of vote centers and a carload of accomplices could flip a close election.
Speaking with our editorial board on Thursday, L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan acknowledged that nothing is in place to prevent or catch voter impersonation at the polls. The SAVE America Act would fix that. Voters in California will also have their own opportunity to fix it in November, when a voter ID initiative will be on the statewide ballot.
The SAVE America Act would require states to keep their voter rolls updated and accurate, something that’s already required by federal law. The president also seeks to limit the use of mail ballots, allowing them only for people who genuinely can’t get to the polls because of military service, overseas residence, travel, illness or disability.
California has, at last count, about 23 million active registered voters, and since 2020, state law has required the counties to mail a ballot to each of them. Are the voter rolls up-to-date and accurate? When proponents of the recall of former L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón investigated the Registrar’s conclusion that they had submitted an insufficient number of signatures, they said they found tens of thousands of registered voters on the rolls who no longer resided in the county. They also discovered through a public records request that there was a discrepancy in the reported number of registered voters.
Registrar Dean Logan’s office had stated in writing that as of December 31, 2021, “the number of active registrations in Los Angeles County is 5,438,400.” However, the county had reported a different number, nearly a quarter of a million higher, to the Secretary of State at almost the same time. Because the signature requirement for the recall to be on the ballot was 10% of the total number of registered voters, proponents were required to collect 566,857 signatures, but they argued that they really needed only 543,840.
In our conversation on Thursday, Logan said there had been a discrepancy, but he insisted that the signature threshold given to the recall proponents was correct.
What about California’s slow vote count? Would the SAVE America Act do anything about that?
It would, by limiting the use of mail ballots and requiring more people to vote at the polls. Nearly all voters would confirm their identity in person, removing the need to closely examine millions of mail ballot envelopes before those votes can be counted. Where mail ballots are used, voters would be required to write the last four digits of a driver’s license or Social Security number to augment or replace signature matching. Logan told our editorial board that an ID or PIN might speed up processing.
Whether it’s the SAVE America Act, the California voter ID initiative or some other reform, there’s a genuine need to close vulnerabilities in election integrity. A calm conversation about it is long overdue.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley