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Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, first let me commend my colleague Senator Whitehouse for his excellent remarks that show all the dangers of the SAVE Act. And like my colleague, I rise today to speak out against the deceptively named SAVE America Act, a bill that would create new barriers for American citizens to exercise their most important right: the right to vote.

The success of our Nation, both as a source of opportunity for all Americans and as an inspiration for freedom-loving people everywhere, has depended upon strong civic engagement from all Americans. When more Americans vote, our government is more representative of the people. It is more responsive to their needs. It has more legitimacy, and it is a better steward of their tax dollars and public resources.

I am here to support laws that make it easier for American citizens to vote. The SAVE America Act will not do that. In fact, it will suppress the right to vote.

The SAVE Act is being portrayed as a simple voter ID bill that is supported by a vast majority of Americans. If the bill simply required every American to show an ID at the polls, then I would not be ringing such a loud alarm.

I represent a State that has a sensible voter ID law and that regularly reviews its voter rolls. This approach has been extremely effective.

The SAVE Act does not simply require everyone to prove their identity when they vote; instead, it requires them to prove their citizenship at the time of registration.

Now, that sounds very simple and very appealing, and people might ask: What is the difference if you have to prove citizenship to register versus showing your ID at the polling place? But as I will explain, proving citizenship at the time of registration requires a total and complete overhaul of our election system and will force millions of American citizens to scramble to gather the right documentation--if they can ever do so at all--while imposing very costly and burdensome unfunded mandates on the States.

That is a charitable version, which assumes that this bill is a good- faith effort to improve election integrity and security. But make no mistake, this bill is a bad-faith effort to help Donald Trump and his potential successors stay in power no matter what the voters say in 2026 and 2028. It is loaded up with additional measures that allow the Federal Government, under his control, to deter people from voting and then to challenge people's votes after they are cast.

It is designed to make people fearful that our elections are not safe and secure. That includes every single election that my current colleagues won. Now, if our elections are so rife with cheating and fraud, as my Republican colleagues would lead you to believe, then do they also think their own election victories are tainted or illegitimate? I think this is a question that the sponsors of the SAVE Act need to answer before we vote.

Here is how the SAVE Act bolsters the tremendous power and resources of the Federal Government and places them at Donald Trump's disposal.

The bill compels the States to share their most sensitive information--their full voter rolls--with the Department of Homeland Security, a Department that has flagrantly violated the American people's civil liberties under the Trump administration.

The bill requires the States to review their voter rolls and purge them of people who have not shown ``documentary proof of citizenship,'' which, based on current law, could encompass millions of law-abiding American citizens. That is right. Technically, millions of Americans could be wiped off the rolls as soon as this bill is passed and signed.

The bill establishes a private right of action allowing anyone to challenge a State official for registering voters that the litigant believes are illegitimate, which means every American's registration is now at risk of being questioned or invalidated. This will open the floodgates to thousands, perhaps millions, of frivolous cases and tangle every election up in knots with never-ending litigation. Indeed, given the record of filing outlandish lawsuits after the 2020 election, it is not hard to imagine that Donald Trump will use this law to contest the registration of everyone he believes is opposed or at least in areas the election is expected to be close.

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Mr. REED. No, I will not yield.

By the way, these mandates and requirements would be effective immediately, meaning they must be implemented for the 2026 election, which, I should point out, is already underway. There are primaries that have been completed in several States, and one could raise issues, if this bill passes, on the outcome of those primaries simply by invoking what the SAVE Act does, which is to question the validity of one's citizenship.

Of course, there is no one better suited to exploit this confusion and chaos than Donald Trump. That is how he has operated as a businessman, as a candidate, and as an elected official. When the bogus suits on the 2020 election results that he and his surrogates filed failed in court after court--62 times--he fomented an insurrection on January 6, 2021, in an effort to cling to power illegitimately.

On that day, 46 of my Republican colleagues had the fortitude to say no to Trump and voted to certify the election, which means they acknowledge the fact that Trump won in 2020. Today, many of these colleagues are prepared to hand Trump powerful new tools to subvert free and fair elections. They know what Trump will do with this power, but they are willing to hand it to him anyway.

President Trump said that he wants the Federal Government, under his command, to ``take over'' elections and ``nationalize the voting.'' The SAVE Act is the vehicle for him to do that.

Does anyone really believe that Donald Trump--the man who stoked that insurrection in which we all fled for safety off this floor, a man who has never accepted an electoral defeat even when the other candidate got more votes--all of a sudden genuinely cares about election integrity? Nobody should be fooled into thinking that.

Since the Civil War until now, our history has been all about securing the right to vote for all Americans--women, African Americans, and young people who could be called upon to fight and die for their country.

Now the Party of Lincoln has shed its proud legacy by advancing policies that would disqualify tens of millions of Americans from voting.

If the SAVE Act is enacted, it will be the latest assault on voting rights that we have seen under the Trump administration through partisan gerrymandering, which he insisted upon and which was unique-- perhaps unprecedented historically--of a President asking to redistrict before the 10-year census window, the deadly insurrection of January 6, as I mentioned, and the subsequent mass pardons of those individuals who tried to overturn an election. Also looming in the background is the Supreme Court, which has gutted campaign finance laws, nullified key parts of the Voting Rights Act, and declined to prevent gerrymandering that has interfered with the bedrock principle of ``one person, one vote.''

Let me now discuss the specific reasons that the SAVE Act is so dangerous and why I will oppose it.

Simply put, the SAVE Act could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, and I cannot support any bill that makes it harder for law-abiding American citizens to vote.

Now, I can see people saying: What is the big deal about making someone show ID?

Well, like many slick sales pitches, this policy is really a bunch of ``gotchas'' that will stand between millions of voters and the ballot box.

Under current law, a vast majority of Americans vote by attesting to their citizenship and by showing a government-issued photo identification card--usually a driver's license--showing that person listed on the voter rolls is the person who is actually casting the vote. The penalties for violating these requirements are severe. This has made the system simple and secure. Indeed, instances of voter fraud are so rare that calling them minuscule would be a gross overestimate.

But under the SAVE Act, a person will need to demonstrate their citizenship in order to register to vote. That can be accomplished only through either a U.S. passport or through a government-issued photo identification card plus a birth certificate with a name that matches what is on the photo ID.

According to the Brennan Center, more than 9 percent of voting-age Americans--those are 21 million people--don't have documents sufficient to prove their citizenship at this time, either a passport or a birth certificate that is readily available. Maybe they are at the home of another family member or are stored in a safety deposit box. And 4 million Americans don't have these documents available at all for many different reasons. Maybe they were lost, destroyed, or stolen. These millions of Americans are most at risk of being prevented from voting.

Americans can, of course, use a passport as documentary proof of citizenship, but more than half of Americans--an estimated 150 million to 200 million citizens--do not have a passport, and to get one, you need to find your birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID, submit the paperwork, pay $165, and then wait a month for it to arrive, which would really bother someone who suddenly, in October, decides that they must vote, and they are legally entitled to do so but can't get a passport.

Proponents of the bill say that Americans can just use a REAL ID to satisfy the requirement. This is a State-issued driver's license which complies with Federal security standards established after 9/11 to limit counterfeiting; and the SAVE Act does say that a REAL ID is acceptable. It says we will accept the REAL ID so long as it ``indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States,'' but that is a false premise.

Fifteen secretaries of state, including Gregg Amore of Rhode Island, wrote:

REAL IDs do not indicate citizenship status. Even if the federal laws for REAL ID were amended, the nearly 140 million REAL IDs that have been issued over the last decade could not be used as proof of citizenship.

Senators Reed and Whitehouse and Congressmen Amo and Magaziner: I write to urge you to vote against the federa1 legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act should it come to a floor vote. Passage of this Act would threaten one of the most core principles of our democracy--our right to make our voices heard--by making access to the ballot box more difficult for millions of Americans. The SAVE Act is creating mistrust in our elections and solving a problem that simply doesn't exist. The Act's main objective is to require election officials to verify proof of American citizenship at the time of voter registration, positioned as a solution to the false notion that non-citizens are voting in American elections in great numbers.

This Act deviates from pro-voter and pro-democracy policies that make it easier for people to cast a ballot by placing an undue burden on voters. The law is already clear. The United States Constitution, Rhode Island Constitution, and Rhode Island General Laws all explicitly state that only eligible United States citizens are permitted to vote in federal elections. It is a felony for a non-US citizen to cast a ballot in an American election.

Should the Act pass, the two most common ways an individual would be able to prove their citizenship would be by supplying a US passport or birth certificate. USA Today reports that only 51% of Americans have a US passport, and the Brennan Center indicates that nine percent of adults (21.3 million people) don't have proof of citizenship readily available. Additionally, millions of Americans, mainly spouses who have changed their name after marriage, currently have a different name than what is reflected on their birth certificate.

Individuals who do not have the required documentation would need to pay the associated fees to obtain those documents. Currently, the cost is $165 for a Passport Book/ $65 for a Passport card. In the city of Providence, a birth certificate costs $22. This is a clear violation of the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution, effectively creating a poll tax in order for eligible citizens to participate in an election. In addition to placing a monetary burden on voters, this Act creates an unfunded mandate on election officials. The Act provides no funding for changes to voter registration systems and voter registration forms, or resources for a robust education campaign to ensure voters understand the dangerous changes this Act makes.

As a government by and for the people, it is imperative that we work together to resist legislation that disenfranchises our constituents and creates barriers for voters and election officials. As Rhode Island's chief elections official, I am available to provide any assistance you may need in that effort. If you have any questions, please contact Deputy Secretary of State Rob Rock. Sincerely, Gregg M. Amore.

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Mr. REED. Now, in Texas, for example, to get a REAL ID, an applicant ``must provide proof of lawful presence in the United States.'' That is according to the instructions to form DL-53, which is the document the Texas Department of Public Safety uses to inform noncitizens of the documentation that they can use to get a REAL ID. Yes, that is correct. You don't need to be a citizen to get a REAL ID in Texas. For example, individuals seeking asylum are eligible for a Texas REAL ID if they provide ``immigration documentation with an alien number.'' So noncitizens who are ineligible to vote can still get REAL IDs. By the way, a REAL ID issued by Texas does not indicate the holder's country of citizenship. So, in Texas, having a REAL ID won't allow you to register to vote under the SAVE Act.

Now, some people may still think that it is easier to get acceptable documents and register to vote in person, but that hasn't been the experience of my constituent who wrote me:

My wife is a native Rhode Islander. We just secured a certified copy of her [Rhode Island] birth certificate from the State Archives a few weeks ago--primarily to ensure that she's able to vote in 2026 and beyond. The fact that we're forced to think about obtaining certified birth certificates as a precondition of voting is completely antithetical to our actual right to vote.

Now, if you don't have money to spare to get the proper documents, if you can't easily get to your town hall to fill in the gaps in your paperwork, if you are just too busy living your life, what are you to do? Faced with these barriers, you may just give up and not vote at all.

Let me tick through the Americans who will be the most directly affected if this legislation passes.

First, there are 69 million women who have changed their names after getting married. Their birth certificates do not reflect that change. While many of them have access to their original birth certificates, that alone would not be enough to register under the SAVE Act. They will also need to produce official documentation that their name has changed and matches what is on their current government-issued photo ID.

Now, if you have been divorced and remarried, good luck getting all that together. This isn't just a barrier for recently married women who haven't gotten around to updating their papers. Women of all ages will be affected.

Another one of my constituents reported an enormous headache with just proving her identity in order to get a REAL ID. And, mind you, a REAL ID is just a modern driver's license that doesn't even indicate citizenship status.

As a divorced woman it took me 3 visits to get my Real ID. The first time I did not realize I needed my marriage certificate. The second time, I brought the divorce decree and it was not accepted. The third time, I had to go to the town hall and have my marriage certificate made. This bill is so damaging to the women of this country.

Can you imagine the hardship that many other women will have to go through not only to get a REAL ID but also to document their citizenship under the system established by the SAVE Act?

Another one of my constituents has similar fears about her elderly mother being turned away from the polls:

If the SAVE Act gets passed, my husband and I still have the ability to vote. But my 85-year-old mother will not. She does not have a passport and changed her name when she married my father in 1964. Please do not let Trump do this to our female voters.

These barriers aren't being faced just by women in blue States. They are being felt in red States too. Take Brandi Halladay from Utah-- Senator Lee's home State. She wrote a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune on March 15:

When my 80-year-old mother moved to Utah, she needed to get a new ID and register to vote. She had to show a birth certificate, her marriage license to my father, her divorce papers from my father (in which she kept his last name to match that of her children) and then her marriage license to her second husband.

This was the only way to trace the name on her birth certificate to her current last name.

This took two trips to the DMV, which was not an easy task for someone of her age who uses a walker, and she was fortunate to have my help in tracking down the relevant documents.

Now imagine trying to do this for a person who may have moved frequently over the course of their lives and has lost documents along the way. They will need to contact various offices, possibly across many states and request the appropriate documentation which may also require fees that they may not be able to afford. And imagine someone working two jobs while trying to raise a family needing to do this.

Now, my colleague from Utah has sought to minimize these burdens. He has pointed to text in the bill, specifically page 14, line 15, purporting to say that ``if you don't have documentation, you don't have a problem'' and that you can register ``without a single additional document other than what you provide to the government in the form of a sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury.''

So if this is true, then what is the purpose of this bill? What the Senator from Utah described is basically the current system, at least in Rhode Island.

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Mr. REED. I will not.

But this is not the way the bill works. If you review the specific page and line that Senator Lee has referenced, page 14, line 15, and just look a few lines further in that same direction--specifically page 15, line 6--the bill says that anyone submitting a sworn affidavit must also ``submit such other evidence to the appropriate State or local official demonstrating that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and such official will make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship.''

This section further requires the State or local official to then file their own affidavit that ``the applicant has sufficiently established United States' citizenship.'' And if that official makes an improper determination, then he or she could be put in jail for 5 years. All I am doing is reading the words on the page that we are being asked to enact into law. I am trying to take a textualist approach and derive the original meaning.

So this purported exception to alleviate the gross injustice that this bill would inflict upon the 69 million women who have changed their names and the 21 million Americans without ready access to the papers, well, this exception wouldn't deliver them any relief at all. They still must show their papers--which exact ones, no one can say. It will be subject to the decision of the clerk who is attesting to it. Asking the clerk to risk 5 years in jail simply for permission to register to vote doesn't sound like much relief at all. It is another ``gotcha.''

Second, young Americans in college will face issues at the polls. The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. This was a critical reform in the Vietnam war era that embodied a simple principle: If you are old enough to fight, you are old enough to vote. It is the height of hypocrisy to place barriers to vote in front of any American citizen who puts his life on the line to keep us safe.

Well, in Rhode Island, which has a voter ID law, a college ID is sufficient to show at the polls when voting. But through the SAVE Act, that Rhode Island law would be invalidated; a college ID is not on the list of ``valid photo identification'' in the SAVE Act. And I will bet there are very few college-age students bringing their birth certificates with them to school. At their parents' rightful insistence, these documents are probably kept locked away at home. And very few college students go through the trouble of getting a local driver's license because they only are temporarily living where they attend school. So young Americans may disproportionately get turned away, maybe be denied the right to participate in civic life, even though they have so much riding on it.

Concerns that many Americans will be stripped of their voting rights are not theoretical or hypothetical. We have seen this play out very recently. In 2013, Kansas implemented a State version of the SAVE Act. According to the Associated Press, it was ``one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory.'' In other words, it was a total failure, and we are on the verge of replicating that failure nationwide. It was such a failure because over 30,000 Kansans-- that is 12 percent of everyone seeking to register--saw their registration suspended or invalidated. Fortunately, in 2018, the court stepped in and invalidated the Kansas law before it could do more damage.

As Trump and the Republicans are purportedly trying to do now, Kansas was trying to prevent noncitizens from voting. It turns out that this is a completely illusory problem. In Kansas, only three noncitizens registered to vote each year from 1999 through 2012. That is a total of 39--or 0.002 percent--of all registered voters. The court found that these were nominal cases, explained by administrative error and confusion. And of the 39, only 11 actually voted.

When invalidating the Kansas law, the court found the following fundamental and fatal flaws:

The law had acted as a deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote. At least one applicant testified that he opted not to apply to register to vote again, despite possessing documentary proof of citizenship, because of the burdensome experience of being held in suspense and prevented from voting in 2014 due to the law.

Based on this record, the magnitude of the burden on unregistered eligible Kansas voters cannot be justified. The evidence at trial demonstrated that the documentary proof of citizenship law disproportionately impacts duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration. It also may have the inadvertent effect of eroding, instead of maintaining, confidence in the electoral system.

Imagine disqualifying 30,000 legitimate Kansas voters because, over a 13-year period, a total of 39 noncitizens were mistakenly added to the voting rolls. This unfortunate episode in Kansas is a cautionary tale for us here in Congress. We should learn from their mistake. We should be humbled by their mistake. And, more importantly, we should not repeat their mistake. In Kansas, it made no sense to punish 30,000 law- abiding American citizens who wanted to vote, just to prevent 11 noncitizens from voting.

The way to solve this election problem of noncitizen voting is simply to enforce existing Federal and State law, that only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote, with strong penalties for noncompliance. Under Federal law, it is a felony for noncitizens to vote. Section 1015 of title XVIII of the U.S. Code states that:

Whoever knowingly makes any false statement or claim that he is a citizen of the United States in order to register to vote or to vote in any Federal, State, or local election (including an initiative, recall, or referendum) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

The Rhode Island Constitution states, ``Every citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen (18) years or over who has had residence and home in this state for thirty (30) days next preceding the time of voting, who has resided thirty (30) days in the town or city from which such citizen desires to vote'' is eligible to vote.

Under current law, to register in Rhode Island, all voters must attest to their U.S. citizenship. They must ``swear or affirm that I am a U.S. citizen.'' Then check a ``yes'' or ``no'' box for whether they are a citizen of the United States. They are warned on the registration form--a simple, one-page document--that ``if you sign this form and know it to be false, you can be convicted and fined up to $5,000 or jailed for up to 10 years.'' And then to vote in Rhode Island, all voters must show a valid photo ID.

These laws are enforced. They are an effective deterrent. They have made our elections safe and secure, and that is why noncitizen voting is so rare. According to Christine Stenning, the President of the League of Women Voters in Rhode Island, ``There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election's outcome.''

Research from the Heritage Foundation, perhaps a preeminent Trump- aligned conservative think tank, found only 77 instances of noncitizen voting from 1999 until 2023, each of which was investigated by the authority. That is 77 out of hundreds of millions, maybe even more than a billion, votes cast during this time period. During the 2016 election, an exhaustive study by the Brennan Center found that at least 30 cases of noncitizen voting were referred for investigation.

And in Trump's first term, 2017 through 2021, only 19 people were indicted for voting without U.S. citizenship. In 2024, the numbers looked very similar. The top election official in Utah reviewed all 2.1 million registered voters and found just one ``confirmed noncitizen'' registered to vote, and that person never voted. In Idaho, officials found 36 ``very likely'' registered noncitizens, and not all of them voted. The secretary of state of Idaho said that ``out of the million- plus registered voters we started with, we're down to 10 thousandths of a percent'' of the overall count--``10 thousandths of a percent.''

In Louisiana, investigators found 390 noncitizen registrants out of 2.9 million. Only 79 had voted in an election over the last several decades; in Montana, only 23 possible noncitizen registrants out of approximately 785,000; in Georgia, only 20 out of 8.2 million; in Maricopa County, AZ, only 2 out of 2.5 million.

Now, none of these people should have registered or voted, and they should be punished for breaking the law, but we are talking about a handful of votes. We do not need a complete overhaul of our election system and to potentially strip millions of American citizens' voting rights when the evidence demonstrates that this purported issue is already addressed by current law.

According to an op-ed by Stephen Richer of the Cato Institute, a famously conservative and Republican-leaning think tank, the results of these State investigations, in his words, ``affirm what is simply common sense. People largely aren't willing to risk their status in the United States--the land of economic opportunity--for the ability to cast one more vote out of hundreds of thousands or millions in a state and hundreds of millions in the country.''

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a loudspeaker for conservative views, similarly said about the SAVE Act:

Although Mr. Trump insists that voter fraud is endemic, his big claims aren't backed by hard evidence. The President recently said illegal aliens are voting in such huge numbers that he won Minnesota three times.

Audits in a variety of places--Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Utah, Idaho--have found noncitizen voting and registration to be rare. Other states might be worse, but consider incentives: Illegal immigrants who want to stay are trying to be avoid being noticed by the authorities. Green card holders have much to lose if they commit a crime. Prosecuting violations is good for deterrence, and vigilance is important.

Now, you might be thinking that you are a law-abiding citizen or have lived in the same neighborhood for decades and, therefore, you have nothing to worry about if the SAVE Act were enacted--not so. Even if you have been registered for decades and voted without issue, you still should be worried about what the SAVE Act means for you. States would be required to report their full voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security and certify that there are no noncitizens on their list. And the Federal Government can require then States to purge their voter rolls of any suspected noncitizens.

Think about it this way: The Department that maintains the ``no fly'' list, which often misidentifies people, will be now maintaining a no vote list. What could go wrong?

There is not a single State that commonly requires documentary proof of citizenship on par with the SAVE Act. So how will the States be able to meet this new mandate and avoid voter purges? The short answer is: They can't--at least not easily. So there is a real risk that States will take a conservative approach to compliance and require all their voters to reregister with documentary proof of citizenship.

In addition, the SAVE Act does not contain any express language protecting voters who have already registered under the current system, so there is also a risk that Trump's DOJ could use authority under the SAVE Act to find a State's entire voter rollout of compliance with the ``documentary proof'' of citizenship requirement.

If that happens, someone who has voted for decades, and lived in the same home, could be forced to reregister.

Consider those 30,000 U.S. citizens in Kansas who were in the exact same boat and were denied the ability to register to vote. If you can't furnish the required documentation or you are busy and miss the window to reregister, well, you simply won't be able to vote in the 2026 election and maybe beyond that.

The SAVE Act will centralize all States' voter rolls in a Federal Government database. According to the Campaign Legal Center, ``this is a plain attempt to bully states into sharing voters' sensitive personal information with the Federal Government. Making matters worse, the SAVE America Act places no restrictions on what the Federal government can do with the sensitive data once DHS receives it.''

That is sensitive personal information for around 75 percent of the Nation's adults. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has said that ``DHS's desire to turn the SAVE program into a de facto national citizen registry raises significant civil liberties concerns.''

My Republican colleagues should tell the American people whether this invasion of privacy is worth it. I do not personally believe that it is.

Such a database is an irresistible one-stop shop for hackers and foreign governments to steal America's most sensitive personal information.

Again, this is not a theoretical concern. A whistleblower report from last week alleged that a former DOGE representative with ``God-level access'' to Social Security Administration servers copied data onto a thumb drive and planned to share it with a private employer.

The data allegedly included the ``Numident'' and the ``Master Death File'' containing more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents' names.

We have seen the current administration be incredibly sloppy and careless with classified information, from then-former President Trump taking documents with security classification markings to Mar-a-Lago and storing them in his bathroom to the current Secretary of Defense sharing military strike plans via Signal with a journalist.

In 2015, the Office of Personnel Management announced that it had been a target of a data breach targeting over 22 million records involving security clearances in which Social Security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and addresses were exfiltrated by hackers working on behalf of the Chinese Government.

Now, ask yourself if you would trust Secretary Noem and Attorney General Bondi to keep the personal information of the 200 million registered voters safe. Would you trust them with your name, address, date of birth, driver's license number, and biometric information like height, weight, hair color, and eye color? The SAVE Act asks you to place that trust in them. I personally would not.

So the SAVE Act centralizes election administration with the Federal Government. It reveals another fatal flaw in the bill which, again, replicates mistakes and the problems with the Kansas law. It is this centralization that makes the SAVE Act, in my view, unconstitutional.

Article I, section 4 of the Constitution reads:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.

So the Constitution says that the States play a role in election administration. It says the Congress place a role in election administration. It does not say anything about the Executive branch playing a role in election administration. And yet that is exactly what the SAVE Act would do. It gives DOJ and DHS, which are part of the Executive branch, immense power to determine the sufficiency of State voter registration laws and then to mess around with State procedures to actually conduct elections.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page said March 18 that:

The decentralized nature of American elections is a source of resilience, and Republicans rightly opposed President Biden's attempt to federalize voting rules on the lax California model. Have they given up federalist principles?

Well, it appears they have.

Now, one could argue that if the Congress intervenes, then the constitutional requirement is met, but we have seen daily this administration ignore Congress, ignore the law, and ignore the Constitution. This will be a pass for President Trump to exploit the elections that are before us.

And you can bet that there will be lawsuits initiated as soon as the ink is dry with President Trump's signature. And before the Supreme Court ultimately weighs in, there will be litigation in district courts and the appellate courts across the country.

There will be conflicting rulings, and the constitutionality of the SAVE Act will almost certainly not be resolved before the 2026 election--possibly not even until the 2028 election. In the meantime, there will be mass confusion about the rules that govern those elections.

And the 2026 elections, as I said, are already underway. At least six States have already had their primary elections. If the rules suddenly change or there are mass purges of the voter rolls between the primary elections and the general elections, then that will undermine the integrity of the election far more than the illusory problem of noncitizen voting.

In addition to these constitutional infirmities, there are tremendous unfunded mandates and burdens that will be placed on the States if this law is enacted.

According to Rhode Island secretary of state Gregg Amore, the State government would need to change its voter systems and forms. It may need to purchase new voting machines and equipment, and it would need to pursue a significant public outreach campaign to educate voters about changes in the law. But the SAVE Act provides zero dollars to cover these costs. States and localities will need to cover this unfunded mandate, and that means higher taxes or more debt.

With regard to Rhode Island, first, Rhode Island would be required under the SAVE Act to essentially eliminate registration by mail and online. Under current law, any Rhode Islander can print and then fill out a voter registration form, get their signature notarized, and mail it to their town hall or they can complete the process entirely online--they can do it entirely online. The SAVE Act requires anyone who registers by mail to also present documentary proof of citizenship in person at the election office by the registration deadline. While the election is silent about online registration, I am assuming the same rule applies.

So Rhode Islanders will need to spend precious time and inconvenience to go in person to show their proof of citizenship, which means that this process of mail-in registration will be practically eliminated.

As I said at the beginning of these remarks, what I would like to see is to make voting easier for American citizens, not to give my constituents yet another headache, place additional demands on their time, and impose, frankly, ridiculous government mandates--especially when it comes to exercising their fundamental rights to vote.

Second, Rhode Island would need to narrow its list of acceptable photo ID to present at the polls when voting. Rhode Island law permits voters at the polls to verify their registration and identity through ID cards that are issued by educational institutions and government- issued medical cards. The SAVE Act would not permit these cards.

Rhode Island currently permits voting without photo identification if accompanied by a birth certificate, Social Security card, or government-issued medical card. The SAVE Act does not permit nonphoto IDs to vote under any circumstances.

This example alone should shred any notion that the SAVE Act is a simple voter ID law. If it were, then the very sensible procedures currently used in Rhode Island would be acceptable. They have been in operation since 2012 without any issues. And yet, my Republican colleagues would meddle in them for no discernible and compelling reason.

Third, Rhode Island would need to submit its own voter rolls to DHS and purge anyone suspected of being a noncitizen within 30 days of enactment and then on an ongoing basis. The State must submit its voter rolls to the DHS ``SAVE'' system to identify noncitizens and then purge them from its rolls. Anyone identified as a noncitizen who believes that is a mistake must meet the new documentary proof of citizenship requirement and reregister.

Rhode Island and many other States--red States and blue States alike--are actively litigating with DOJ to rebuff the Federal Government's attempts to obtain its voter rolls. DOJ hasn't even said why it wants this information. Nobody should believe it is for any legitimate purpose.

DOJ has been losing in court, and this legislation would essentially end this litigation against the States' interests. DOJ should be defending what it is doing in court, not coming to Congress for a bailout, nor should we give them a bailout.

This meddling by the Federal Government is completely unnecessary. Rhode Island already undergoes regular voter maintenance efforts. A statewide voter mailing in 2020 ultimately resulted in 60,619 inactive voter registrations being removed from the State's voter list. Since 2023, election officials in Rhode Island have removed 107,738 voters from the voter lists through maintenance and processes.

In November 2025, the Rhode Island secretary of state launched the latest effort to ensure the State's rolls are accurate. The government mailed every single registered voter in the State asking them to review the information in their voter record and update any inaccurate or outdated information.

Rhode Island is already a participant in information-sharing agreements to identify potential instances of election fraud through the Electronic Registration Information Center or ERIC, which 25 States use for voter list maintenance and identification of potential instances of election fraud. Our States are constantly and actively determining that their rolls do not contain people ineligible to vote.

Fourth, Rhode Islanders will need to pay to comply with the new Federal mandates. The State, as I indicated, must conduct a marketing campaign to ensure that Rhode Islanders are aware of the requirement to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register. The State must notify every person who registers by mail of the requirement to provide documentary proof of citizenship prior to voting. The State must change its registration forms and its signage at the polls. As noted above, the State must review its entire voter rolls for citizen status.

So the SAVE Act says that Rhode Island--a State where noncitizen voting is punishable by 10 years in prison and where everyone must show ID at the polls--would need to radically overhaul its voting system and pass those costs on to the taxpayers in order to meet new Federal mandates.

The proposal on the table is to throw out State rules about voter ID and require what is effectively a national ID, while ignoring current law that already makes it a serious crime for noncitizens to vote. That is a raw deal to fix a nonexistent problem.

This is so dangerous because it will break a system that successfully prevents fraud and replace it with one that makes it harder for American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

So why are they doing this? The real reason, in my view, is to support Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, even though he lost by 7 million votes and even though 46 of my Republican colleagues voted to certify the election.

They are doing this in service of President Trump's ego and his insatiable desire for power--power that he is using to take revenge on his political enemies and reward his political allies; power that he is using to personally enrich himself and his cronies through corrupt business deals, while he leaves the American people holding the bag through his tariffs; power that he is using to no longer provide Medicaid to children and seniors, while funding yet another ``forever war'' in the Middle East; and power that he is using to remain above the law, immune from prosecution, based on a sweeping Supreme Court ruling that he is protected so long as he is President.

Let's examine the record of how Trump is executing this power grab. It is systemic. It began on day one, and this is a component of that effort.

He has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security that defends our Nation's infrastructure from cyber attacks. This includes all kinds of election components, including voter registration databases, voting machines, and related IT systems.

Congress created CISA during Trump's first term to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, in which the Russian Government sowed misinformation to aid the Trump campaign. CISA provides election offices nationwide with intelligence briefings and cyber security systems. In 2023 and 2024, it conducted 700 cyber security assessments for local election jurisdictions across the country.

But upon returning to office, Trump immediately froze all CISA election security work. DOGE cut 130 employees from CISA, including its election security advisers. Trump dismissed the head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, which provide crucial intelligence to CISA regarding foreign cyber threats to election infrastructure. Trump terminated or cut funding for the public-private and State-Federal partnerships that CISA uses as conduits for the Federal Government to help the States.

At CISA, Trump installed one of his cronies to be his eyes and ears: the 2020 election denier Marci McCarthy, who was the chair of the DeKalb County, GA, Republican Party and has amplified false claims of voter fraud in Georgia and spread disinformation about voting machines. She obviously has zero cyber security expertise.

(Mr. LEE assumed the Chair.)

Democrats want free and fair elections that have integrity. The biggest threat to achieving that is not the illusory problem of noncitizen voting but, rather, outside threats from foreign actors, like the Russian Government, who have actually tried to manipulate election outcomes and who have sophisticated capabilities in cyber space.

According to the 2025 ``Annual Threat Assessment'' prepared by the Director of National Intelligence--that is, Tulsi Gabbard, by the way, who is not exactly known as a Russia hawk--``Moscow probably believes information operations efforts to influence U.S. elections are advantageous, regardless of whether they affect election outcomes, because reinforcing doubt in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system achieves one of its core objectives.''

Defunding and gutting CISA is entirely consistent with the core Russian objective to sow doubt in our democratic process. The ``Annual Threat Assessment'' goes on to forecast that ``Moscow's malign influence activities will continue for the foreseeable future and will almost certainly increase in sophistication and volume.''

If Trump were actually committed to election integrity, he would not have gutted the Federal Agency responsible for securing our election infrastructure against this threat. But that is exactly what he has done.

As if to remove any doubt that Trump's primary objective is perpetrating his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and create the circumstances to perhaps do the same thing in 2026 and 2028, he issued an Executive order directing the Department of Justice to investigate the former leader of CISA, Chris Krebs, after he had the temerity to say that ``the 2020 election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.'' By the way, at the same time, Trump canceled Mr. Krebs' security clearance.

Over 40 cyber security experts have condemned the ``political persecution'' of Krebs. They wrote in an open letter that ``by placing Krebs in the crosshairs, the President is signaling that cybersecurity professionals whose findings do not align with his narrative risk having their businesses and livelihoods subjected to spurious and retaliatory targeting.''

Here we have a prime example of Donald Trump using the machinery of the Federal Government to intimidate into silence those who refute his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and plagued by widespread fraud, and he is gearing up to do the same thing in 2026 and 2028. Trump has stacked DOJ, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and other parts of his administration with cronies, sycophants, and loyalists who perpetrated the Big Lie in 2020 and organized the Stop the Steal movement that culminated in the deadly insurrection on January 6.

Notable examples include the following individuals: Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, who represented President Trump and his campaign in the past and continues to amplify Trump's debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election; Maureen Riordan, the recently departed Acting Chief of the Voting Section at DOJ, who is another election skeptic and defender of voter suppression tactics, who has reiterated unfounded claims of widespread voting by noncitizens; Eric Neff, the current Chief of the Voting Section at DOJ, who has been leading this dangerous effort to compel the States--including Rhode Island--to turn over their voter rolls.

Mr. Neff has been reprimanded for his past work in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, where he pursued a case against an election software company based on evidence provided by a conspiracy- driven election denier group called True the Vote. The charges were ultimately dropped, Neff was put on leave, and the L.A. taxpayers were stuck paying a $5 million settlement.

Ed Martin, the Pardon Attorney at DOJ, represented January 6 rioters in court and has defended Trump's claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Kurt Olsen, the White House Director of Election Security: Mr. Olsen was a Trump campaign lawyer who worked on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including being part of the Texas attorney general's attempt to get the Supreme Court to stop four swing States from certifying Biden's 2020 victory over Trump.

Heather Honey, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Election Integrity at DHS: Ms. Honey worked closely with Cleta Mitchell, who participated in Trump's infamous call with the Georgia secretary of state, pressuring him to ``find'' sufficient votes for Trump to win the State, which I think most casual observers would cite as one of the most egregious attempts to influence votes illegally that we have seen-- certainly, from a President.

Honey was on the ground in Maricopa County, AZ, for a Republican- backed audit seeking proof of fraud in the 2020 election. Honey pushed a conspiracy that there were more votes counted than were cast in Pennsylvania.

And Gregg Phillips, the Director of the Office of Response and Recovery at FEMA: Mr. Phillips was a board member of True the Vote, the organization that traffics in conspiracy theories that Mr. Neff used to pursue a faulty case against an election software company. Phillips made the outrageous claim that he reviewed voter rolls with over 3 million noncitizens on the rolls in 2016--absolutely preposterous.

The machinery of the Federal Government has already been deployed, through these individuals and others, to relitigate the 2020 election and intimidate election officials into doing Trump's bidding in 2026 and 2028.

On January 28, the FBI raided the election office in Fulton County, GA, and actually seized ballots. Fulton County contains the State's biggest metropolitan area--Atlanta--where half a million votes were cast in 2020. According to court documents, the reasons for this raid were the same claims and conspiracy theories that underpinned Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election. It was based on a referral from Kurt Olsen, whom I discussed above. He was a key person who tried to steal the 2020 election and is currently working in the White House, which historically and for good reason, has not directed law enforcement, which is supposed to be nonpartisan and based on facts and evidence and the law, not the whim of the President.

The FBI's affidavit claimed a discrepancy in votes cast and votes counted of 3 percent, but, in reality, those numbers were off by less than 0.2 percent. That the FBI would mislead the court to justify this raid about 2020 should give everyone tremendous concern about what kinds of falsehoods will underpin efforts to subvert results in 2026 and 2028.

A similar ``investigation'' about the 2020 election is underway by the FBI in Maricopa County, AZ, which is the State's largest metropolitan area.

So why is the FBI investigating an election that occurred 6 years ago, and why is the FBI focusing on the biggest cities in the two States that swung the election against Trump? Again, it is to perpetrate the Big Lie and to lay the groundwork for interference in the 2026 and 2028 elections.

It is not just the Federal Government that has been stacked with election deniers who are dedicated to making sure Trump remains in power. Trump has also installed allies at every level of State and local election offices. These allies stand ready to do his bidding and disenfranchise large numbers of voters who oppose him. These efforts by Trump's enablers have already disenfranchised American citizens. In North Carolina, Republicans sought to cancel 65,000 votes in a judicial election last year. An estimated 2,000 to 8,000 of the votes were military and overseas voters.

Speaking of the military, Trump may be preparing to use the National Guard in order to deter Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. He signed an Executive order requiring each State to be ready to deploy a ``National Guard Response Force'' with a total of 23,750 members nationwide that can be ordered into States without the consent of local Governors. And under existing law, the President has command of a ``Quick Reaction Force'' of 2,000 National Guard members. He can deploy them nationwide to any State within 8 hours of notice.

Trump may try to abuse his authority as Commander in Chief to place these forces in polling places--perhaps in Fulton County or Maricopa County--under the guise of ``protecting'' them. They could be used to quell protests if Trump tries to steal another election.

Trump famously did not deploy the Guard to defend the Capitol on January 6. But now the pendulum may well swing in the other direction. He could preemptively deploy the Guard to deter people from voting.

Steve Bannon last month on a podcast stated:

[W]e're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. President Trump has to nationalize the election. You've got to put--not just, I think, ICE--you've got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You've got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people . . . actually registered to vote and people that are United States citizens vote in this election.

So here you have Steve Bannon--someone who is very close to Trump and who essentially served as his consigliere in the first administration-- openly saying that the military and ICE should be enforcing the SAVE Act.

Steve Bannon said he wants the 82nd Airborne to do voter intimidation. I served in the 82nd Airborne. I was a platoon leader and a company commander. It is so offensive to our values and so denigrating for the men and women in uniform for Steve Bannon to suggest that they should be turned against their own neighbors, to be conscripted to help President Trump cling to power. This is not what happens in functioning democracies; this is what happens under authoritarian regimes and in dictatorships.

Lest anyone believe Mr. Bannon's attempt to cultivate himself as a deeply read intellectual, I would note that it is a criminal offense for military officers to do what he has proposed. Section 592 of title 18 of the U.S. Code says that if a commander sends troops under his command into a polling place, he can go to jail for up to 5 years:

Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force shall be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

That is the military forces.

This notion of ICE being at the polls is just as concerning. Agents have detained law-abiding American citizens who have gotten caught up in Trump's mass deportation campaign. So there are some citizens who would be justified in thinking that it is still risky to go to the polls, lest you inadvertently get picked up.

What is the criteria for ICE to stop, detain, and harass people? It seems to be how they look, not what is in their hearts, not that they are dedicated Americans, not that they may be police officers in civilian uniforms, not that they may be former veterans.

If ICE will be asking people to ``show their papers'' before they even enter the polling place, then that adds more time, more process, and more complexity to something that should be quick, easy, and simple.

Finally, even if you do not cast a vote, the bill contains a dangerous private right of action allowing anyone to challenge another voter's registration status. That provision can be used with great effect to challenge large numbers of votes in States and localities that elect non-Trumpers.

Even if those claims are meritless and ultimately dismissed, they will tangle the courts with so much litigation that we will not know the actual election results for months on end. That sows additional mistrust in the process and, depending on the judges who hear these cases, could result in mass disenfranchisement of U.S. citizens who vote.

Given the data I have recited about the paltry numbers of noncitizen voters, reviews of the voter rolls after the fact and strong enforcement of existing criminal penalties are more than sufficient to achieve the purpose of allowing American citizens to vote and encouraging them to do so.

So this is not about election integrity or protecting the will of voters. This is about voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is about keeping Trump and his gang in power. This about Trump knowing that he is deeply unpopular, that he could be on a path to lose fair and square and trying to bend the rules and create the machinery for the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and even the military to do his personal bidding to cling to power. If that happens, if he is successful, then we will no longer be a democracy.

Lest anyone still think that this bill is about ``election integrity'' and not 100 percent about Donald Trump's power grab, my Republican colleagues have added two provisions covering ``culture war'' provisions that denigrate trans rights--Donald Trump's favorite boogeyman and his personal pet issuing having precisely nothing to do with the alleged scourge of noncitizen voting.

I am proud tonight to join my Democratic colleagues in sounding the alarm. We want to help our fellow citizens participate in our elections because only their participation will ensure that the government is truly accountable to the people it represents.

My secretary of state Gregg Amore has said:

The SAVE Act deviates from pro-voter and pro-democracy policies that make it easier for people to cast a ballot by placing an undue burden on American citizens. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and requiring documentation proving citizenship effectively creates a poll tax for voters. President Trump is disregarding our country's separation of powers as the SAVE Act makes its way through Congress.

This isn't or should not be a partisan endeavor. Democrats and Republicans shouldn't be afraid to face the voters--all the voters--and compete on the basis of our ideas and aspirations. The SAVE Act shows that Trump has a different agenda--consolidating power for himself while subjugating the American people.

I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will understand that and oppose these efforts.

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