Requiring everyone to show a photo identification in order to register to vote seems like basic common sense. Every adult is familiar with the ritual of fishing their driver’s license out of their wallet to accomplish any number of day-to-day tasks: checking into a hotel, renting a car, securing a post office box, adopting a dog, getting a fishing license, being admitted by the bouncer into a nightclub — the list goes on. Why would the government not require the same for voting, our most sacred act as Americans?
Well, sometimes, the obviously correct position turns out to be profoundly wrong.
The short answer to the “Why not?” question is, put simply, because requiring citizens to produce their passport or birth certificate in order to register and to show a national photo ID to cast their vote on Election Day — both of which would be required by the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act now making its way through Congress — would disenfranchise millions of decent, honest Americans. And it would be doing so to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
All the experts on voter fraud agree on this point. Despite the fevered fantasies of radical right extremists, who imagine flocks of illegal immigrants going to the polls — probably paid to do so — that simply has never happened. As summarized by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-policy think tank, an “analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Cases database found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023.” Read that again. Among literal billions of fair votes cast, only 77 were illegally cast by noncitizens. According to the Heritage Foundation, of all things!
Similarly, according to the B.P.C., “a study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election concluded that there were approximately 30 instances of noncitizens casting votes.”
So what will happen if the SAVE Act is passed by the Senate? For starters, the estimated 21 million American citizens of voting age who don’t have ready access to their citizenship papers — for myriad reasons, from having lost them to having left them at home while attending college out of state — would be unable to register (see: reporting from the Brennan Center for Justice). Millions of others who cannot travel to secure the required new federal identification card — especially the elderly and those who live in remote rural areas — would be unable to vote on ballot day, even if they had their birth certificate in hand. (Consider this for a moment. Whom do you know, here in East Hampton, who might fall into that category, without a car or ride to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Riverhead? Think of your oldest family members and neighbors, who have been voting since the Eisenhower administration.) Then, too, there are millions of married women whose current legal name does not match that on their birth certificate; this legal tangle could disenfranchise millions more.
Do the math: Fewer than 100 fraudulent votes prevented, at the expense of tens of millions disenfranchised.
Proponents of the SAVE bill — including our own congressman, Nick LaLota, a co-sponsor of the legislation — want to protect the election process from a threat that doesn’t exist, and they are willing to do so by making it egregiously, insurmountably difficult for many, many millions of honest citizens to vote. They are taking us for fools. Do not be tricked. The politicians in Washington, D.C., who are behind this bill are fully aware of the nonexistence of the fraudulent voting they keep ranting disingenuously about; this is a voter suppression method, arriving in the innocent-looking Trojan horse of “common sense.”