Democratic senators on Wednesday warned that the SAVE America Act, the legislation the Trump administration is pushing for to tighten access to the ballot box ahead of the November elections, is part of a broader push to “take over” federal elections.
At a forum hosted by Sen. Alex Padilla of California, Democratic lawmakers hoped to prove just how reliable elections in the U.S. are through expert accounts.
“Now there’s conversations amongst the Senate Republican caucus as to when, not if, but when and how, to consider those measures,” Padilla, the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee and former California secretary of state, said in his opening remarks at the forum. “It is not a voter-ID bill, it is very much a voter-suppression bill. It is very much a voter-purge bill. It has so much more in that piece of legislation that should concern people.”
The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or U.S. passport, in order to register to vote. It would also require photo identification when voters cast their ballots, and mandate that states grant the U.S. attorney general access to their voter-registration roles, among other provisions.
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While the forum was not exclusively focused on the SAVE America Act, the emphasis by the lawmakers was a direct response to President Donald Trump, who supports the bill.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his request that Congress “approve the SAVE America Act,” adding baselessly that “cheating is rampant” in U.S. elections.
The legislation narrowly passed the House earlier this month, but faces an uphill battle in the Senate. Majority Leader John Thune has said he wants to vote on the proposal, but not while the Department of Homeland Security is shut down, and he has said Senate Republicans “aren’t anywhere close to the votes” necessary to change Senate filibuster rules, which would be required to pass the legislation.
“As we approach the midterm elections, I think this is top of mind for everybody, and I wanted to make it clear that one, it is a big lie that there is any widespread voter fraud in our elections — our elections are safe, they’re secure, they’re reliable and they’re accurate,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was a speaker at the forum, told NOTUS. “If Trump wants to ensure that our elections are reliable and accurate, the best thing he can do is nothing. He is the one that is threatening our elections with the SAVE America Act [and] his executive order where he tried to have vote-by-mail ballots not counted.”
Advocates have long warned that the legislation, a version of which failed in the Senate last year, would block thousands of eligible voters from registering and being able to cast their ballots.
Padilla, who gave the Democrats’ Spanish-language response to the president’s Tuesday address, said that it was “sad” that he had to host the forum “on his own,” arguing that the event should have been a full committee hearing. But he added that the Republican position that the federal government should not get involved in elections “seemed to be fading.”
Eight other Democratic senators participated in the forum, including Padilla’s fellow Californian, Adam Schiff, and both Georgia senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the latter of whom is facing one of the toughest Senate reelection races in the country.
“In essence, when the president talks last night and the Republicans are talking about passing the SAVE America Act because we have to stop noncitizens from voting, it really is a solution in search of a problem,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said at the hearing, pointing to panelists’ assurances that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The experts Padilla brought to speak at the event included Bonta, whose office is leading several lawsuits against the Trump administration, including on efforts to change voting regulations and processes, and Mo Ivory, the commissioner of Fulton Country, Georgia, which was the subject of an FBI raid at the end of January to seize more than 650 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election.
Warnock said at the event that he had “demanded answers” from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi regarding the raid, but that he “had not yet heard back.”
“Fulton was not the end of it,” Ivory warned in her remarks. “After agents targeted our election office, similar actions followed in Puerto Rico. That sequence matters. It shows that what happened in our county was not an isolated dispute but a model.”
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