Richard Arlin Walker
Special to ICT
A person registering today to vote attests on the application that he or she is a U.S. citizen. Lying is a federal crime punishable by fines and jail time. If the applicant is awaiting citizenship and lies on the form, they blow their chance at citizenship and face deportation.
Republican members of Congress say attesting under penalty of perjury is not enough. But voter rights groups, legal centers and public policy nonprofits say a bill passed by Congress on April 9 would deprive millions of rural and Native Americans, particularly those in Alaska and Arizona, of the right to vote.
H.R. 22, also known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and require individuals to provide proof of U.S. citizenship – in person – to register to vote in federal elections. The Senate must still approve the SAVE Act; similar legislation introduced last year failed to advance.
Follow the bill’s progress at Congress.gov and GovTrack.us.
H.R. 22 would require a voter registration applicant to present a valid U.S. passport or a photo identification card issued by a federal, state or tribal government showing that the applicant’s place of birth is in the United States.
If the government-issued photo ID doesn’t include place of birth, the individual also would have to present a certified birth certificate; an extract from a hospital record; or a final adoption decree showing a United States birthplace; a report of a U.S. citizen’s birth abroad issued by the Secretary of State; or a naturalization certificate or certificate of citizenship issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
A member of the U.S. Armed Forces could show a military ID card with a military record of service showing the applicant’s birthplace.
Advocates say the requirements are onerous.
“It’s difficult for rural folks to get their birth certificates, and those offices are open only for a certain amount of time,” said Mike Williams Sr., a Yup’ik chief and resident of the Kuskokwim River community of Akiak. “I have my passport and my tribal ID, but my wife is trying to get her birth certificate and so far can’t. And they are requiring street addresses in rural areas where many of them don’t have street addresses. They won’t accept a Post Office box address.
“I think this administration is messing around with trying to get voters not registered,” he said.
Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out The Native Vote. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Michelle Sparck, Qissunamiut Tribe of Chevak, is director of Get Out the Native Vote, a statewide voter education nonprofit based in Anchorage under the Cook Inlet Tribal Council.“Only three of the five hubs in Western Alaska have a DMV office, with five contracted services in Region IV – Western Alaska and Arctic – to meet the identification criteria of the SAVE Act and over 37,000 voters in 104 precincts,” Sparck told ICT. “There are no Social Security or passport services in Region IV. Getting a copy of your birth certificate involves choppy mail service or a costly trip to an urban office.
“All villages rely on P.O. boxes for government and tribal services. FedEx, UPS and even Amazon orders end up at the Post Office or at a contracted space and honor system to collect your orders.”
Jacqueline De Leon, Isleta Pueblo, is senior staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund. She told ICT the SAVE Act “would be really detrimental to Native voters” and pointed to two provisions she sees as problematic.
“The first is, it says that tribal IDs are accepted, but really there’s a poison pill in that because it requires the ID to have the proof of location of birth. And to our knowledge, we don’t know of any tribal IDs that have the location of birth on the ID,” she said.
“And then the other is this big push that ballots have to arrive by Election Day. That’s super problematic in our rural communities. In places like Alaska, they’ve got notoriously long mail [delays] because of acts of God and weather that can’t be controlled. Delays are inevitable. Mail delivery routes in Arizona and Alaska are particularly slow.”
The SAVE Act, De Leon said, “would really disproportionately impact and disenfranchise voters.”
What’s driving this legislation are claims by President Donald Trump and his allies that large numbers of non-citizens are voting or registering to vote in U.S. elections.
“It should not be controversial to say that only American citizens should determine the direction of our country through the process of voting,” U.S. Rep. Josh Brecheen, a Republican from are a Oklahoma – one of four Native American members of Congress – said in July 2024 in support of an earlier version of the SAVE Act.
“The only reason Democrats and President Biden oppose this commonsense legislation is because they want millions of illegal aliens to vote so they can stay in power. House Republicans are taking action to ensure America’s elections are safe and secure.”
Claims such as Brecheen’s, however, have been repeatedly found to be without merit. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election were determined by several courts to be unfounded.
“Politicians at all levels of government have repeatedly, and falsely, claimed the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections were marred by large numbers of people voting illegally,” the Brennan Center for Justice reports. “However, extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators.”
The Center for American Progress – a public policy institute whose board members include former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro and Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta – said the SAVE Act could be problematic for female voters as well.
“As many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name, and millions of transgender Americans do not possess these documents reflecting the name they use,” the center reported on its website.
“Additionally, the in-person requirements of the bill would mean accessible voter registration systems that tens of millions of citizens, including 60 million rural Americans, rely on every election cycle would no longer be available. The SAVE Act would force some rural Americans to drive up to eight hours round trip, and even cross state lines, just to update their voter registration information.”
That’s already the reality in the Navajo Nation, where counties have implemented ID and address requirements that are burdensome, said Jaynie Parrish, Dine’, executive director of Arizona Native Vote.
“We’re already seeing much of this, but now it’s proposed as legislation,” she said.
A resident of Chinle tried to vote in the 2024 election but her ID had her maiden name, not her married name, “so there were issues there,” Parrish said.
Voter registration applicants who don’t have a physical address are asked to provide their home’s latitude and longitude and the Google Plus code, an alphanumeric code that acts as a digital address for places without formal addresses – information they may not know or know how to find, Parrish said.
“This is the way voter suppression works,” she said. “They want you to give up at the first sign that it gets hard. They want you to give up and not make that trip or not find that paperwork. That’s why it’s pivotal to have groups like ours on the ground all year long, educating voters and helping them prepare as much as they can.”
Voters in Apache County, which shares geography with the northeast corner of the Navajo Nation. faced other hurdles at the polls in the 2024 presidential election. Several voters showed up to vote only to learn that their polling place had been changed. The county’s election equipment failed, the county ran out of emergency ballots, and “some voters faced wait times of two to three hours, with others forced to leave without casting a ballot because of time constraints,” The Navajo Times reported.
NPR reported in October 2024 that states have a series of mechanisms “to help weed out people who are ineligible to vote before they could cast a ballot.”
Fraud protections are already in place
NPR reported: “States, by law, are required to routinely remove ineligible or deceased voters from their rolls. And there are tools like the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, that help states share voter data.
“Depending on the type of voting — in-person vs. mail-in — there are also a host of protections that would keep someone from casting a ballot that isn’t theirs, or from voting altogether if they are ineligible. That includes things like signature matching, dropbox surveillance, as well as poll worker training.”
Even data collected by the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that pulled together Project 2025, failed to prove widespread voter fraud.
In a study of presidential and congressional elections dating back to the mid-1980s, Heritage Foundation found 36 ineligible voters cast ballots in Arizona – of a total 42.6 million ballots cast. During that same time frame, ineligible voters cast 23 ballots of the 64.7 million cast in Georgia; ineligible voters cast 19 ballots of the 64.5 million cast in Michigan; ineligible voters cast eight ballots of the 8.5 million cast in Nevada; ineligible voters cast 58 ballots of the 81.6 million ballots cast in North Carolina; ineligible voters cast 39 ballots of the 100.5 million cast in Pennsylvania; and ineligible voters cast 69 ballots of the 45.3 million cast in Wisconsin.
Not all voters were non-citizens; several were U.S. citizens who were convicted of felonies and had not had their voting rights restored.
“Voter fraud is serious, which is why there are many protections built into the system to protect against fraud,” The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research organization, reported. “The bottom line — whether it’s vote fraud or government fraud — facts matter, and isolated instances of fraud do not constitute a widespread trend.”
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