There is no epidemic of noncitizens stealing American elections. There never was. And yet here we are, watching Senate Republicans burn legislative oxygen on the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act – a bill its own supporters cannot defend with evidence, because the evidence does not exist (Herald, March 18).
The Brennan Center for Justice found voter fraud incident rates between 0.0003 and 0.0025% – statistically indistinguishable from zero. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own fraud database contains just 68 total cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Federal courts in Arizona concluded that noncitizen voting there is “quite rare, and noncitizen voter fraud rarer still.”
The facts are settled. The SAVE Act is not about facts. It’s about fear – and November.
Trump has peddled the lie of rampant voter fraud since before he won his first election. After 2020, his campaign filed 62 lawsuits challenging the results. Sixty-One were rejected. His own attorney general rejected it. His own election security officials called 2020 the most secure in American history. The lie persisted anyway, because it was never about truth. It was about manufacturing a crisis to justify a solution designed to shrink the electorate.
That manufactured crisis has reached Colorado. The Trump administration demanded the state hand over voters’ driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Secretary of State Jena Griswold refused, correctly, saying the Department of Justice had no legal right to the data. The administration sued – one of 18 states targeted in a campaign that voting rights attorneys warn could purge tens of millions from voter rolls before the midterms.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune knows this bill cannot pass. Republicans hold 53 seats; they need 60 to break the filibuster. Rather than shelve it, Thune is stretching debate for a week or more – theater to appease Trump and force Democrats to defend a position most Americans already hold: that voting should not require a bureaucratic gauntlet.
The bill’s requirements are severe. Some 21.3 million eligible citizens – 9% of voting-age Americans – lack proof of citizenship readily available. Fewer than half hold a valid passport. Married women who changed their names could need birth certificates, marriage licenses and more just to register. In New Hampshire, enforcing a similar law, one woman was turned away from her town election because her decades-old marriage certificate was in another state. That is not an isolated incident – that is 69 million American women.
A narrower photo ID requirement might have earned genuine bipartisan support – and that is a conversation worth having. But requiring a passport or birth certificate to register is not a reasonable safeguard. It is an obstacle course that falls hardest on the elderly, the poor and communities of color.
Rep. Jeff Hurd voted yes – twice. He has shown commendable independence on tariffs and public lands. On this, he is wrong, and he should know it.
Trump has said the SAVE Act will “guarantee” Republicans win the midterms. He is not wrong about why he wants it. His tariffs represent the largest U.S. tax increase as a share of the economy since 1982, costing the average household an estimated $1,500 this year. Medicaid faces historic cuts. Health care marketplace premiums are surging after his party let enhanced tax credits lapse. Gas prices jumped nearly a dollar a gallon in a single week in Durango – the result of a war with Iran he promised never to fight. His approval ratings are underwater on virtually every economic issue that touches working families.
When your record is that unpopular, you don’t run on it. You conjure a phantom threat, wrap it in the flag, and dare your opponents to defend democracy out loud.
American elections are not overrun with fraud – not nationally, not in Colorado, not in La Plata County. What is actually under threat is not the integrity of our elections, but the access of millions of eligible Americans to participate in them.
The Herald’s editorial board calls on Senate Democrats to hold firm, calls on Rep. Hurd to reconsider what this bill actually does to real voters in his district, and calls on all readers to see the SAVE Act plainly: not election protection, but election manipulation – dressed in the language of the very thing it is designed to undermine.
