With last month’s House passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, there is hope that election integrity will be strengthened and public confidence in voting outcomes restored. However, Democrat opposition to the legislation, as “part of a broader disfranchisement effort,” must still be overcome in the Senate to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections.
The so-called SAVE Act effectively ends large-scale mail-in voting by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and imposing photo ID requirements for casting ballots.
Still, when elections are at stake, reasonableness has never been the strong suit of progressives, sacrificing fair-minded wisdom for win-at-all-costs ballot baloney.
Posing as champions of huddled masses yearning to be free, liberals, once opening our borders, again embrace that sanctimonious mantle, claiming the SAVE Act marginalizes low-income citizens. However, in building future electoral loyalty in the first group and immediate voting success in the second, their underlying motive remains political.
More specifically, according to election researchers at MIT, in 2020, 60 percent of Democrats voted by mail, while only 32 percent of Republicans did. In 2024, that trend continued with 37 percent of Democrats mailing in ballots, compared to 24 percent of Republicans.
Additionally, research estimated that in 2020, 67 percent of mail-in votes went to Democrats, and four years later, 60 percent did. By contrast, in 2020, 33 percent of mail-in ballots were cast for Republicans, rising to only 40 percent in 2024.
But while those statistics are estimates, it is not lost on progressives that eliminating online voter registration and mail-in ballots will assuredly undermine their candidates. Thus, no matter how often Democrats frame opposition to the SAVE Act as efforts to protect suffrage for minorities and the poor, there is little doubt that they oppose that legislation to protect elections for themselves. And that is so, even though the public strongly supports it.
Because the SAVE Act essentially combines proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections with a photo ID requirement for voting in such contests, Republican support is near-unanimous. Independents also show a strong, favorable majority for the legislation, ranging between 80 percent and 85 percent. Even those identifying as Democrats approve of both verification measures by 65 percent to 70 percent.
Yet despite such overwhelming public support, including from blacks and Latinos, 213 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the SAVE Act, with only one supporting it. This opposition is even more concerning when considering that across a wide range of formats, citizenship verification as a voting requirement is nearly universal worldwide.
With flawed reasoning, progressives reject common sense and what the public favors by claiming that requiring proof of citizenship and a photo ID to register and vote is a draconian expectation. Characterizing those SAVE Act requirements as voter suppression, liberals assert that poorer and rural citizens do not have easy access to the required voting documents.
However, photo ID requirements now permeate everyday life, and as Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman said, presenting identification is “not a radical idea.” A short list of such commonly required proof-of-identity situations includes renting a car, opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, checking into a hotel, cashing checks, seeking unemployment benefits, obtaining or renewing a driver’s license, and buying age-restricted products such as alcohol or tobacco.
And liberal complaints that the SAVE Act disproportionately inconveniences poor citizens without easy access to proof of citizenship documents ignore that such verification is required for Medicaid and, in most cases, food stamps. What is more, liberal assertions that needy Americans are helplessly incapable of securing voting documentation are disrespectful to the very people they claim to support.
This is the case because there are many documents proving citizenship, including birth certificates, passports, military IDs, and certain driver’s licenses. And for immigrants who become citizens through naturalization, a Certificate of Naturalization also serves as proof of citizenship, as does a Certificate of Citizenship issued to people deriving citizenship through their parents.
The bottom line of progressive ballot baloney is that it is too difficult for rural, low-income, and elderly Americans to comply with SAVE Act voting requirements. But if so, then undoubtedly the overwhelming public support for the legislation wouldn’t exist.
And besides, a million Americans died in battle to protect our democratic right to vote. How could anyone then seriously claim that it requires too much sacrifice to obtain the proof to do so?
Moreover, as a general rule of human nature, people do what they want to do, and if they don’t want to do something, they often invent a reason not to. As such, claims that it’s too difficult to obtain documentation to vote in federal elections under the SAVE Act are invented excuses not to do so.
Most importantly, the real issue for liberal opposition to the legislation is not credential inaccessibility, but rather that eliminating fraudulent voter registrations and mail-in ballots will undermine their electoral fortunes.
And anyone gullibly ignoring that reality by continuing to consume polarizing baloney about voter suppression should also avoid buying any oceanfront property in Arizona.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
