Competing Claims on SAVE America Act Disenfranchising Voters

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said the SAVE America Act “could disenfranchise over 20 million American citizens,” while Republicans dispute that the voter registration and ID bill would block any legitimate voters. Election experts say the bill, which isn’t expected to pass, would make it difficult for some unknown number of voters to register and cast a vote.

At times, Schumer has used more definitive language about the bill’s impact, saying that “more than 20 million legitimate people … will not be able to vote under this law” or that it “would disenfranchise tens of millions of people.”

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us the legislation wouldn’t meet the dictionary definition of “disenfranchise,” which is to “deprive a person of the right to vote.” But it would, as described by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, “‘make it harder and more expensive for [many people] to [register and] vote,'” Olson said in an email. “That extra hassle and expense would mean that some citizens eligible to register and vote will, in practice, not complete the needed process even though the bill does not take away their legal right to register or to vote.

“How many eligible people will fail to complete the process? Any estimate is guesswork at this stage in part because it depends on factors that the bill itself leaves unspecified,” he said.

Schumer’s 20 million figure comes from an estimate of the number of voting-age Americans who don’t have easy access to citizenship documents that the bill would require to register to vote. According to a 2023 survey by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and other groups, more than 9% of Americans of voting age, or 21.3 million people, wouldn’t be able to “quickly find” documents such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers if they “had to show it tomorrow.” More than 3.8 million of those people don’t have those documents, the survey found.