It’s the latest step in the MAGA plan to overhaul U.S. elections, by which “overhaul” means “disenfranchise millions”: The “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” or SAVE Act, will be put to a vote in the House on Thursday. This week’s vote will follow President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional power grab of an executive order on voting last week, and comes hot on the heels of the president’s clarification over the weekend that he was absolutely not joking about securing an unconstitutional third term for himself. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick talked with Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, about why the SAVE Act would be an unprecedented move by Congress, how free and fair elections are under increasing threat in the United States, and what concerned citizens can do about it.

Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can you just walk us through what the SAVE Act does and doesn’t do?

Wendy Weiser: In the past, every time Congress has passed rules regarding elections, they’ve improved the voting process, expanded access to voting, but the SAVE Act, if passed, would be the first time in our nation’s history that Congress passes a law suppressing votes, restricting access to voting.

The SAVE Act would require a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register to vote in federal elections, which is a vote suppression measure that could block millions of eligible Americans from voting. Just over half of Americans actually have a U.S. passport. To the extent that the act allows birth certificates or other documents to vote, we’ve run studies with the University of Maryland and other data analysts and found that more than 9 percent of voting age citizens—that’s 21.3 million American citizens—don’t have a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers readily available.

Seventy-nine percent of married women change their names, so their current names are not going to match the names on their birth certificates. So to the extent that a passport or a birth certificate are required to register to vote, it’s going to be especially harmful for married women.

In addition to disenfranchising up to 21.3 million people, the SAVE Act would also completely upend voter registration. It would end mail registration. It would end voter registration drives. It would end online registration and make it much harder to do automatic voter registration, because it requires voter registration to happen in person. You need to show those documents in person to an election official, you can’t mail it in. So rural voters, voters with disabilities, older voters are also going to face special burdens, in addition to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have these documents readily available.

Congressional Republicans have listed this bill as one of their top 10 priorities for legislation for this year. I think it is possible to beat this bill back. It’s wildly poorly drafted and unpopular, and it completely upends elections and undermines women in particular, but it is actively moving right now.

The SAVE Act, like Trump’s executive order targeting elections, is claiming to solve a problem that has been proven over and over again to not really exist: this myth of horrific vote fraud, and foreigners voting, and Mickey Mouse voting 40 times. Remind us what the data shows about alleged noncitizen voting.

We have multiple layers of protections in American elections to ensure that only citizens vote. To the extent that there are outliers or exceptions, they are caught and prosecuted. It is very, very rare. It is so rare that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a noncitizen who voted or to find any kind of individual voter fraud in American elections.

For a noncitizen, the benefits of voting, to that person, are very small, but the penalties are extraordinary. They could face jail time, $10,000 in fines, deportation, and being barred from the United States. There’s a record that you did it, a written record that you signed, so if you get caught, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. It’s no wonder that this doesn’t happen.

And yet, House Speaker Mike Johnson had this to say last May about why he thinks the Save Act is so necessary: “We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

That’s the trick: generate panic about a crisis that doesn’t exist, and then say the only way to solve it is these sweeping authoritarian solutions, and by the way they just so happen to devalue women and minorities and the young, and they also substitute facts with feelings.
The other thing it’s really important to notice about the SAVE Act and the executive order is that they put the lie to the idea that as long as we have voting in America, we have democracy. We forget that they have elections in Hungary, they have elections in Russia. The mere fact that there would still be elections at the end of these interventions does not mean that we have free and fair voting. So give us your best argument, especially for the people who think we can just wait for Democrats to turn it around in the midterms, that elections matter more than ever and this is not the time to take them for granted.

While our voting rights are under attack, they haven’t been taken away, and people should not be demoralized. You should not slow down. Mobilization does make a difference. You still have power and you should be using it, and now is the time to be using it.

And that is not just a matter of voting. Showing up at town halls, having your own shadow town halls, writing to your editor, writing to your friends, taking to social media—all this still matters. We still can stop this. We cannot take our eye off the ball of ensuring that our elections are free and fair in the face of creeping authoritarianism.

Elections are the principle way in which we can hold power accountable, that we can change the course of the country. So the first attack is always on the elections, to try to make sure they’re not free and fair, to try to keep people from voting, to try to rig the redistricting lines. We need to continue to fight for free and fair elections, and the first thing we need to do is push back these very aggressive attacks on elections and on election integrity.

Make no mistake, the SAVE Act is not an election integrity bill. It does nothing to improve election integrity. It is a vote suppression bill. The main thing it does is target millions and millions of eligible American citizens. It does not target ineligible people; they are not being caught up in this. It is a vote suppression bill, pure and simple. But we cannot stop there. There have been attacks on election officials across the country. There are attacks on judges across the country. There are efforts to put in place vote suppression measures in states across the country, including measures to require a birth certificate or passport to vote in state elections pending in almost half the states in the country right now. If the SAVE Act passed, all of those could immediately become law as well. So we cannot take our foot off the gas pedal. We need to be out there in the statehouses, we need to be out there in front of the White House, and we need to make sure that everybody in Congress knows that we will not tolerate a vote suppression bill from this Congress, especially at this time.