A DIFFICULT TRUTH: The United States has never fully lived up to the ideals in its founding documents. Throughout our history, our country’s fate has always been bitterly contested. Will we privilege whiteness, maleness, straightness, ability, and wealth? Or will we aspire to an inclusive future that equally values all God’s children?
Voting rights have often been the front line in the struggle for an inclusive democracy where people choose their leaders and can hold them accountable at the ballot box. This includes ensuring that elections are free, fair, and safe. We made great progress in the past 60 years through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in voting, and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which made it easier for all eligible citizens to register to vote. Though we all have different roles to play in building a radically more just society, defending, strengthening, and ultimately transforming our democracy makes so much other justice work possible.
That’s why the SAVE Act is so alarming. If passed, it would shift the burden of verifying voters’ U.S. citizenship from election administrators to individual voters who would be required to provide, in most cases, a passport or birth certificate. Millions of Americans don’t have a passport. And people who have legally changed their name, including for marriage (69 million of whom are women) or a gender transition, do not have a birth certificate that matches their legal name. The SAVE Act would disproportionately disenfranchise married women, elderly registrants, young voters, Latine voters, lower-income voters, and active-duty military personnel and their families, according to the Institute for Responsive Government.
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