BIG NEWS: The SAVE Act failed.
Some massive good news for once: the SAVE Act failed in the Senate yesterday.
The bill would have required every American to present documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote: a passport, a birth certificate, or a REAL ID that indicates citizenship.
This is the second time the SAVE Act has died in the Senate. I’m glad it did. But here’s what I want you to know: if it had passed, we were ready.
We had started sketching a web app. You’d enter your information. It would tell you exactly what documents you need to register, where to get them, what they cost, and how long they take. A single-purpose tool that walks a voter, step by step, through the bureaucratic process of proving something they’ve always been: a citizen. If the vote had gone the other way last night, we would’ve been shipping a first version within weeks.
This is the thing I want donors like you to understand about how we work. If Congress moves to make voting harder, we will build the tools that help voters register anyway.
And this isn’t new for VoteAmerica. Turning disenfranchisement into software has been our story from the beginning. Every time a state introduces a new barrier, our team — engineering, research, program staff, and partners — sits down together to figure out the smartest way to help voters navigate it.
We’re tactic-agnostic. We haven’t overcommitted to any one playbook, which means we have the time, the team, and the partnerships to respond to whatever comes for voters next.
The SAVE Act will be back. Its House sponsors have already said so. State-level versions are passing in the meantime. Florida signed one in March. Whatever form the next version takes, our answer is the same: we’ll help voters comply with free software at scale.
