The SAVE White Supremacy Act: America’s Old Friend Resurfaces

The U.S. Senate opened debate this week on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Supporters of the bill claim it will safeguard U.S. elections. However, detractors of the bill, like myself, contend that this is yet another attempt to save white supremacy.  

The SAVE Act requires voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when casting their vote. The U.S. House narrowly passed the bill in February.

If the legislation passes, citizens will have to prove their citizenship by showing a birth certificate or a U.S. passport. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, 9% of all eligible voters lack proof of citizenship, 52% of registered voters lack an unexpired passport, and 11% don’t have a birth certificate.  

To make things even more complicated, critics point out the problem with birth certificates. When a person marries and opts to change their last name (in most cases, women), the surname on their ID will not match the surname on other forms of ID issued after the marriage. What happens then?  

Citizens must then present a valid U.S. Passport, something more than half of registered voters do not have. Additionally, a U.S. Passport currently costs $130, plus a $35 processing fee. Requiring a passport essentially amounts to a poll tax.

The SAVE Act will amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which simplified voter registration by making it available when citizens applied for a driver’s license. Signed by President Bill Clinton, the bill was known as the Motor Voter Act.

Proponents of the SAVE Act claim this additional requirement will protect the integrity of elections and deter voter fraud. To hear them speak on the topic, one would conclude that voter fraud is rampant. However, facts tell a compellingly different story.

The Bipartisan Policy Center reports, “Many state election offices began using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program in 2025 to verify voter citizenship. Records from this program show that just 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizens.”

Let’s put this into perspective.

U.S. citizens have a 0.317% (1 in 315) chance of being killed by a firearm this year. In other words, you’re more likely to be shot going out to dinner than someone from another country casting a fraudulent vote.  

Additional problems with the new requirements persist, but are truly an extension of the previous version of one of America’s favorite pastimes: white supremacy.  

Demetria McCain, the director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, responded to the House’s passage of the bill, “The SAVE America Act is not about protecting our elections — it’s about disguising voter suppression techniques aimed at disenfranchising Black voters as election security.”

She continued, “It is disingenuous, it is discriminatory, and it is all based on a continuously disproven narrative of voter fraud propagated by an administration concerned not with voter protections but solely with the fear of letting people select their own leaders.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) suggested the bill would bring back Jim Crow-style voting.

As debate plays out this week in the U.S. Senate, I am reminded of W.E.B. Du Bois’ famous quote, “A system cannot fail those it was never intended to protect.”

Let us not forget that every person other than white male landowners had to fight for their right to have a say in the self-governing experiment known as the United States. White supremacy is woven into the very fabric of the United States, bound in the stitching that keeps “Ole Glory” waving in the wind.

Martin Luther King Jr. was spot on when he said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

The SAVE Act is just another attempt by white supremacists to impede voting by marginalized communities and consolidate power by a shrinking minority of white conservatives.  

When the current surge of new conservatism began to rise in the U.S., fueled by the Religious Right, it was political strategist Paul Weyrich who said out loud what was once said behind closed doors: “I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

From the Electoral College to the SAVE Act, democracy was created as a restricted idea, yet sold as a veiled opportunity for all. Unfortunately, there remains a single truth about a veil: It’s still a barrier between oppression and freedom.

The SAVE Act is not about safeguarding U.S. elections; it is about suppressing the vote. It’s about consolidating power back to a small minority of white “landowners” that maintain their privileges and wealth while the carrots of freedom and democracy dangle before our faces.

Don’t buy into the misleading arguments in favor of the SAVE Act. They are nothing more or nothing less than America’s old friend, white supremacy.