Donald Trump has a very simple explanation for why his political enemies object to his proposed election law, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (otherwise known as the “SAVE America Act” or just the “SAVE Act”). He laid it out in his State of the Union address earlier this year.
One reason, because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say, ‘What imagination they have.’ They want to cheat.
According to Trump, “cheating” (by which he primarily means noncitizens voting) is currently “rampant.” The SAVE Act would save us from this problem by requiring everyone who registers to vote to prove they’re a citizen by producing documentation, such as a passport or birth certificate. While the law has several other controversial provisions, the president and his allies routinely express astonishment that anyone anywhere could have a problem with this central requirement.
But in truth, anyone who wants as many citizens as possible to exercise their right to vote should have a problem with this law.
All available evidence shows that noncitizens showing up to vote is vanishingly rare. For example, the Heritage Foundation — a right-wing, pro-Trump think tank that promotes “mass deportations” and advocates laws like the SAVE Act allegedly designed to crack down on noncitizen voting — did a study of available records that shows only one hundred cases of noncitizens voting in the entire country between 1982 and 2025. To put that number in perspective, 144 million people voted in the 2024 election. One hundred cases in forty-three years is a microscopic number.
Meanwhile, though, quite a few of those 154 million voting citizens might have been deterred by the SAVE Act. According to an estimate from the Brennan Center, about 21.3 million voting-age American citizens lack ready access to proof-of-citizenship documents. Millions more married women…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
