How the SAVE Act Bill Could Affect High School Students
Talk to a teen about this voter suppression bill today.
The SAVE Act currently before Congress would prevent millions of eligible Americans from voting by requiring would-be voters to show their passport or birth certificate in order to register. Nowhere else do we need to show these documents to engage in routine transactions (international travel is not routine for most Americans.) The act is especially unfair to high school students since they are just coming of age.
In the US, you have to register in order to vote. More than 4 million Americans turn 18 every year (more than 10,000 every day.) But our voter registration systems are so complicated and user-unfriendly that in midterm election years according to US Census data, under 30% of 18-year-olds actually register to vote.
The SAVE Act would make it even harder to register, especially for high schoolers: everyone doing it for the first time would need a document to prove their citizenship, usually a passport or a certified copy of a birth certificate. This is not like showing a driver’s license to prove you can buy alcohol - your driver’s license wouldn’t work here.
It’s not only students, of course - anyone who has changed their name, including married women, would be affected. So would people moving homes and having to re-register. But older voters tend not to move as often as young people and they’ve had years to register already.
Right now, we estimate that more than 70 percent of young Americans who will be 18 or 19 by the midterms in November are not yet registered. That means, more than 5.6 million potential new voters, born from late 2006 through Nov. 3, 2008, would be banned from voting by the SAVE Act, unless they can show their passport or birth certificate.
The SAVE Act does not come with any funding to help young people know about and overcome these barriers.
I wanted to see how hard it might be to get myself a new birth certificate: turns out with an expediting agency, it takes 25 days and costs $45.30. And that was without millions of disenfranchised people all trying to order their documents at the same time.
Imagine that you live in a state with a registration deadline 30 days before an election, like Alaska, Ohio, or Texas, under a best-case scenario, you’d have to pay a significant service fee and do so by early September (Sept. 9) in order to be able to vote in the midterms. What if you’re in college, and school doesn’t start until mid-September? What if state agencies are massively backed up in processing times because of the surge in demand? You are just out of luck, and that is not your fault. It would be a failure of democracy.
None of this is hypothetical: Congress is actively debating the federal Save Act and different permutations of the bill. Several states has enacted or are considering their own versions.
So what can we do? Young people across the country should:
Contact your Senators now, and tell them that this bill will block millions of eligible Americans from voting and is fundamentally unfair.
Talk to a teen about the SAVE Act today.
Share this message so others will do the same.