No problem
Donald Trump wants you to prove your citizenship before registering to vote. He does not care how onerous or expensive it is to acquire these documents. This SAVE America Act, which is being forced to a vote in Congress, will disproportionately affect married women whose last names no longer agree with their birth certificates. Birth certificates or marriage certificates cost money to acquire. You may have been born a U.S. citizen overseas or are a naturalized citizen and must get documentation from a foreign country. This SAVE America Act requires you to go in person to your registrar’s office, which in rural areas may be an hour away without public transportation. The disadvantaged, people of color, women, and naturalized citizens will be affected most by this bill. A passport can only solve this problem if you have a spare $165 to acquire one, and you will still need to prove your citizenship first. A REAL ID driver’s license does not prove citizenship. Every time you move, you must go in person to notify the registrar of an address change. Voting by mail will be severely restricted and will only count if received by Election Day.
Will every currently registered voter need to reregister with proof of citizenship? Can your county registrar “handle” the tens of thousands of voters descending on their offices?
The Heritage Foundation, a far-right group, has made public its database. From 1999 to 2023, of over one billion votes cast, there were only 77 cases of noncitizens voting. Voter fraud is a lie. Donald Trump wants to suppress selected groups of voters. As former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in February, “When it gets to Election Day, we have been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead the country.”
We do not need to fix what is not broken.
Please contact your elected representatives in Washington to protect our right to vote, not suppress it with a lie.
Al Liebeskind, Millsboro, Del.
. . .
I hope all people, but our legislators, in particular, will be honest with themselves in their assessment of the SAVE America Act. Some simple information searches, such as “How many illegal votes in the last 50 years,” will bring up numerous studies concluding that voter fraud is exceptionally rare. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation found only 1,620 cases nationally in the 43 years from 1982 through 2025. Seriously ask yourself: If you were in the country illegally, would you bring attention to yourself by attempting to vote? Here’s another search for you: “How many legitimate voters will be prevented from voting based on the SAVE Act?” The Brennan Center of Justice puts this at 3.8 million at a minimum, and potentially up to 20 million voters due to people not having — or having difficulty obtaining — certain documents. Perhaps not so coincidentally, those impacted voters primarily consist of Black and brown people and married women who took their spouse’s last name or hyphenated their last name.
By supporting the SAVE America Act, Sen. Dave McCormick must think it is more important to potentially prevent 38 illegal votes than it is to knowingly deny a minimum of 3.8 million legitimate votes from being cast (or 100,000 legitimate votes suppressed for every illegitimate vote prevented).
The proponents of SAVE America claim it is designed to ensure election integrity, but based on the sheer magnitude of the number of legitimate votes denied vs. fraudulent votes prevented, it sure seems like voter suppression.
Kent Kingan, Malvern
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