Donald Trump asked Republicans to pass the SAVE Act “for Jesus.” He’d have been better calling out George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

The debate has focused on the bill’s many dangerous aspects. But the SAVE Act builds on voter suppression that Republicans have been carrying out for the past 25 years. The Democrats need to talk about this history, because whether or not this bill passes, there will be others like it to come.

The bill attacks voting rights in multiple ways:

• It requires a passport, birth certificate, or a handful of other documents to register and vote, excluding student IDs, most driver’s licenses, and tribal IDs lacking an expiration date. More than 21 million Americans lack ready access to these documents, with Black, Latino, and Asian citizens three times more likely to not have them.
• It eliminates most in-person voter registration drives, since election officials would need original proof of citizenship and groups can’t submit proof on people’s behalf. It also severely disrupts or limits online and mail registration.
• It mandates voter purges every 30 days, allowing people to be mistakenly thrown off the voter rolls right before elections.
• It gives access to state voter files to an administration eager to manipulate or evade laws to consolidate power.

The SAVE Act didn’t just emerge, but builds on a long and problematic history.

In the 2000 presidential election, Florida, under governor Jeb Bush, threw 12,000 largely African American voters off the rolls by falsely charging them with being former felons, who Jim Crow-era laws prohibited from voting. This set the stage for a Republican-appointed Supreme Court to tip the state to Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, by 537 votes. Over 960,000 Florida former felons remain without a vote, including 12% of all African American potential voters, because the governor and legislature undermined a successful 2018 initiative that was supposed to give them back their rights.

President Bush benefitted from disenfranchisement again in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Kenneth Blackwell purged 300,000 largely African American voters from the rolls in cities like Cleveland and Columbus, including one in four Cleveland voters, without which, he probably would have lost the state and therefore the Presidency. Blackwell also tried to reject thousands of registrations because they were on the wrong weight of paper and allowed each county, whatever its size, just a single early-voting station, leaving the state’s major cities with five-hour lines.

In 2013, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court overturned major sections of the Voting Rights Act that made it harder for states with histories of discrimination to limit voting rights. Immediately afterward, Southern states began passing newly restrictive laws. North Carolina, for instance, passed a new voter ID law invalidating student IDs, public employee IDs, and photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies (while allowing gun permits); shortened the early voting window; banned same-day registration during early voting; and prohibited paid voter registration drives. It also prohibited extending voting hours in the event of long lines, eliminated the right to cast a provisional ballot if you end up at the wrong precinct, and ended a highly successful high school registration program. Local election officials also began removing on-campus voting stations, relocating them sometimes miles away. A federal Appeals Court overturned much of the law, saying it had targeted African Americans with "almost surgical precision."

Other states once deterred by the Voting Rights Act including Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama passed similar laws to limit acceptable ID. Alabama’s excluded Social Security cards, birth certificates, Medicaid or Medicare cards, and Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards. More than half a million voters were removed from Georgia's rolls in 2017, including over 100,000 who simply hadn't voted in recent elections or responded to a mailed notice. These laws and others similar created voting rate gaps of up to 24 points between white voters and voters of color, ones that didn’t exist before the new laws.

The rationale was to prevent voter fraud. But a five-year Bush administration crackdown convicted just eighty-six people of voter fraud nationwide, most of whom had simply made mistakes regarding their eligibility. The Save Act focuses on non-citizens voting, but even Project 2025 creator The Heritage Foundation found just 68 proven cases going back as far as the 1980s. While the most dedicated voters will find ways to register and vote, voter suppression laws are like adding hurdles to a running track. Top athletes can still surmount them. If you’re just a bit less skilled or dedicated, you’re likely to give up.

So yes, let’s warn of the SAVE Act’s specific destructive consequences. But let’s also talk about the anti-democratic history on which it builds, because this probably won’t be the last Republican attempt to deter the vote.

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