The SAVE Act (H.R. 22 / S. 128) would force Native voters living in rural or remote areas to travel great distances to register to vote.
- The SAVE Act would effectively eliminate popular methods of voter registration, including online and mail registration, as well as voter registration drives.
- Americans would be required to physically travel to their designated election office, during weekday business hours, to present their documentation to an election official.
- American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native citizens living in rural and remote areas travel further from their elections offices than the average American. In some areas of the country people living in Tribal communities would have to travel over 100 miles or even get on an airplane in order to reach their designated election office.
The SAVE Act would disenfranchise eligible American Indian and Alaska Native voters.
- The SAVE Act would require all Americans registering to vote to provide documents that prove their citizenship. For most, this “show your papers” law would require voters to produce a passport or birth certificate every time they register or re-register.
- More than 21 million eligible voters don’t have these documents readily available. Some Americans are more likely than others to lack these documents, including elderly and younger voters, American Indian and Alaska Native voters, and the millions of married individuals who changed their names causing their documents to not match.
- When Kansas and Arizona implemented similar “show your papers” laws, they blocked tens of thousands of eligible American citizens from registering to vote.
- Arizona’s law has blocked about 35,000 voters from voting in state and local elections, including disproportionately high numbers of voters who live on Tribal lands or college campuses. The SAVE Act, which is even more restrictive, will block even more Native voters from participating in federal elections as well.
The SAVE Act would block American Indian and Alaska Native citizens’ ability to use Tribal identification alone to register to vote.
- The SAVE Act misleadingly claims that Tribal members will be able to use their Tribal ID to register to vote. However, it requires that Tribal IDs include the ID holder’s place of birth in order to satisfy the Act, but Tribal IDs, like other forms of government-issued ID do not include place of birth information.
- American Indian and Alaska Native citizens with a Tribal ID would need to provide an additional document, such as a certified birth certificate, hospital record, or adoption decree to register to vote. These documents are difficult to obtain and expensive to replace if they are lost or destroyed.
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