Citizenship voting requirement in SAVE Act has no basis in the Constitution – and ignores precedent that only states decide who gets to vote

  The Republican-led House of Representatives passed on April 10, 2025, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act – or SAVE Act. The bill would make voting harder for tens of millions of Americans.

  The SAVE Act would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to first “provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” in person, like a REAL ID or a passport.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of citizens

  The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

Beware the cry of fraud. That’s where American authoritarianism always starts.

  The end of American democracy won’t be a man declaring himself dictator for life or crowning himself king.

  It will come incrementally. Through a rapid narrowing of the electorate that can vote without facing state intimidation.

  The forms and rituals of the republic will remain in place. But the spirit will be entirely gone.

Voting rights at risk after Supreme Court makes it harder to challenge racial gerrymandering

  Two recent Supreme Court rulings on congressional redistricting will have starkly different consequences for Black voters in the 2024 election.

  One ruling boosted Black voting power in Louisiana, while another decision upheld a South Carolina congressional map that the lower court had declared “illegal racial gerrymandering.”

  Despite these seemingly contradictory outcomes, there is a through line.

Supreme Court rules in favor of Black voters in Alabama and protects landmark Voting Rights Act

  In a surprising ruling on June 8, 2023, the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional districts in Alabama that a lower court had ruled discriminated against Black voters and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  At issue in the case that was before the court, Allen v. Milligan, was whether the power of Black voters in Alabama was diluted by dividing them into districts where white voters dominate. After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts to include only one out of seven in which Black voters would likely be able to elect a candidate of their choosing.

Grassroots activists educate voters in Alabama city, despite losing fight for inclusive district map

  One by one, the impassioned residents of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, stood to challenge the majority-white city council.

  The residents who spoke represented a multiracial coalition and supported an increase in representation on the city council elected by Black voters for this city with a growing population of color.

Voting Rights Impaired: Alabama man fights voter suppression of people with disabilities

  Eric Peebles can do so many things.  

  He runs his own successful consulting business with a nationwide reach. He held a university faculty job and holds seats on two statewide boards. He gives advice to health care and consumer officials across his home state of Alabama, even though he struggles to breathe when he talks because of a condition called spastic cerebral palsy. 

  For all the things he can do, there is one important thing he cannot, and that is to vote – at least not easily, simply, and privately. Especially during a pandemic. 

Making it easier to vote does not threaten election integrity

  As state legislators consider hundreds of bills on election policies this spring, false claims of voter fraud are being repeated as justification for proposals to claw back recent advances that have made voting easier for Americans.

  In debates about election policy, making it easier to vote and election integrity are frequently presented as opposing goals. Increasing one, it is argued, means decreasing the other.

The state of women’s suffrage – 100 years later

  The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, but systemic sexism and disenfranchisement of Black women still block equitable access to the ballot.

  Like other disenfranchised people in the United States, women have employed many strategies over the years in their fight for the right to vote.

  In the late 19th century, some women pushed for equal suffrage laws in individual states. Others turned to the courts. Still others made their voices heard through public protests, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

Voting rights advocates prep for perfect storm in 2020

  Carla Duffy and Janet Savage waited nearly three hours in the hot sun outside the George Ford Center in Powder Springs, Georgia to cast ballots in the state’s June 9 primary. Masked up to ward off the coronavirus, they were determined to vote despite lines that snaked down the street.

  After about 90 minutes in line, voters at the predominately Black precinct were told the state’s new voting machines were not working. In a scene that played out across the state, they were given paper ballots. The ordeal left Duffy and Savage with little confidence in Georgia’s ability to conduct a fair election in November’s presidential contest. The primary, for example, was originally scheduled for May 19 but was pushed back due to concerns about the pandemic, a delay that appeared to have little effect on the state’s readiness once voters arrived at the polls.

Hank Sanders: Sketches #1725 - We must rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge “The Bridge To Freedom”

  The Edmund Pettus Bridge is a powerful symbol all over the world. The bridge is a symbol of voting rights, a symbol of struggle, and a symbol of freedom. The name of the bridge must be consistent with this powerful symbolism. We must rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge as The Bridge To Freedom.

Stripping voting rights from felons is about politics, not punishment

  In 2018, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment ending the disenfranchisement of ex-convicts. Though it excluded people convicted of murder or sexual offenses, Amendment 4 restored voting rights to felons “after they complete all the terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”

  Civil rights groups and prisoner rights groups celebrated the election result. In contrast, Republicans worried that allowing felons to vote would tilt Florida toward Democrats.

Alabama law raised obstacles on his five-year journey to the ballot box but Richard Williams overcame them all

  Richard Williams had an epiphany on his birthday in February 2013.

  He was living in a house in Huntsville, Ala. with nearly a dozen men who, like him, were recovering from substance use disorder. “I turned 58. And it hit me like a ton of bricks: I am 58 years old, sleeping on a top bunk in a house with a bunch of men. Now, I thank God for that situation, because I was good,” Richard told the Southern Poverty Law Center. “But the reality is, man, I'm missing it. I'm not where I'm supposed to be. That sparked the fire into me.”

Closing polling places is the 21st century’s version of a poll tax

  Delays and long lines at polling places during recent presidential primary elections – such as voters in Texas experienced – represent the latest version of decades-long policies that have sought to reduce the political power of African Americans in the United States.

  Following the Civil War and the extension of the vote to African Americans, state governments worked to block black people, as well as poor whites, from voting. One way they tried to accomplish this goal was through poll taxes – an amount of money each voter had to pay before being allowed to vote.

Hank Sanders: Sketches #1707 - They said it could not be done, but we continue to do it

  They said it could not be done, but we did it. It was 1964, and the Civil Rights Act had just been enacted by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders were thankful, but they were still pressing for legislation to ensure voting rights for Black people. Voting was the last legal right being clearly denied to Black people in the United States of America. The highest political officials and others said that no such legislation could possibly pass Congress on the heels of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation ever. They said it could not be done, but we did it.

The struggle for Native American voting rights

  November is Native American Heritage Month – a fitting time to honor the resistance and resilience of Native peoples, including their fight to be heard by and represented in the government that dispossessed them for centuries.

  The first inhabitants of this land have been expressly disenfranchised for most of U.S. history.

  Excluded from birthright citizenship, American Indians found that, unlike immigrants, there wasn’t a naturalization process for them because they were not considered “foreigners.” During Reconstruction, they were excluded from rights acknowledged by the 14th Amendment, which bolstered civil rights for formerly enslaved people.

Fighting an internal threat to our democracy

  In his recent testimony before Congress, Special Counsel Robert Mueller pointedly warned the nation about Russia’s ongoing attempts to meddle in our nation’s elections.

  All Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, should be gravely concerned about this threat from abroad. But we should be equally – perhaps even more – concerned about efforts to rig our elections from within.

  Since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, partisan politicians at the state level have enacted a wave of voting restrictions that have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people.

Challenging the whitewashed history of women’s suffrage

  Recently members of the U.S. House of Representatives wore yellow roses to commemorate the passage of the 19th Amendment in the lower chamber on May 21, 1919.

  Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment by the two-thirds Congressional majority – an action that sent the amendment granting women the right to vote to the states for ratification.

  But we must not forget that while the 19th Amendment was momentous, the reality was that it did not grant the franchise to all women in the United States. In practice, it ensured the franchise for primarily white, middle- and upper-class women; women of color largely did not enjoy the right to vote.

Long lines, broken machines, voter ID laws: Welcome to the neo-Jim Crow

  Felon disenfranchisement was designed to “preserve the purity of the ballot box,” or in other words, the whiteness of the electorate.

  By the time the Alabama Supreme Court issued that opinion in 1884, Florida had already beaten it to the punch. Florida outlawed voting for anyone convicted of a felony in 1868, at the very same time that it began to convict more black people of felonies.

  Exactly 150 years later, Florida voters finally overturned that discriminatory policy, re-enfranchising 1.5 million people in a single stroke last Tuesday. The news that Florida had passed Amendment 4, giving as many as 40 percent of the state’s black men the right to vote, was cause for celebration around the country and certainly here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where we invested heavily to support its passage.

Conservative lawmakers are suppressing voters—Here’s what you can do to fight back

  Another election year, more voter suppression. Every election, eligible Americans—particularly people of color, young people, and Americans with disabilities—are forced to fight for their fundamental right to vote.

  For years, conservative lawmakers have systematically excluded and actively prevented these groups from making their voices heard in the democratic process. Suppressing the vote of people of color, for example, dates to the origins of America, when voting was reserved for white male property owners. Even with the 15th Amendment, racially motivated disenfranchisement—such as poll taxes, felon disenfranchisement laws, issuance of English-only voting materials, and discriminatory voter purges—has become a horrific and shameful electoral tradition in the United States. Young Americans and Americans with disabilities have also historically been targeted by voter suppression measures, such as strict voter ID laws that exclude student IDs as acceptable forms of identification and polling places that are noncompliant with requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).