The SAVE Act and the Myth of a Voter Fraud Crisis

Source: The Rational League (Substack) URL: https://therationalleague.substack.com/p/the-save-act-and-the-myth-of-a-voter

The Premise: A "Crisis" That Does Not Exist

The SAVE Act rests on a claim so frequently repeated that it has acquired the tone of common sense: that American elections are threatened by widespread voter impersonation and non-citizen voting, and that only stricter documentary requirements can preserve the integrity of the ballot. The problem is not merely that this claim is overstated. It is that it is factually unsound.

A comprehensive investigation conducted by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program reviewed 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases across all 50 states between 2000 and 2012. Out of those thousands of allegations, only ten involved voter impersonation, the specific type of misconduct that photo ID laws purport to prevent. In subsequent reviews of more recent cases in high-profile states, no prosecutions for in-person voter impersonation were identified (Edge & Holstege, 2016). The study concluded that the phenomenon is so rare that an individual is more likely to be, "struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls." (Levitt, 2007; News21, 2016).

Independent analysis reported by The Washington Post reached a similar conclusion. Reviewing election data across decades, researchers identified approximately 31 credible cases of in-person impersonation out of more than one billion ballots cast nationwide. The incidence rate was measured in billionths, not percentages (Goel et al., 2014). In statistical terms, the threat approaches zero.

Even data compiled by partisan legal organizations fail to sustain the narrative. The Republican National Lawyers Association catalogued voter-fraud convictions between 2000 and 2010 and found that thirty states, along with the District of Columbia, had three or fewer convictions over an entire decade. (Hines, 2011) Many of those convictions involved registration irregularities, vote buying, or errors by election officials, offenses unrelated to impersonation at the polls. The data do not describe a system under siege; they describe administrative outliers within a functioning system (RNLA, 2011).

Scholarly analysis reinforces this pattern. Lorraine Minnite's research demonstrates that the modern voter-fraud narrative was constructed through the strategic conflation of clerical mistakes, registration paperwork errors, and administrative mishaps with deliberate criminal conspiracy. Irregularities were relabeled as fraud, and isolated anomalies were elevated into evidence of systemic decay. The fraud was not discovered through evidence; it was assembled through rhetoric (Minnite, 2010).

The SAVE Act proposes to redesign the mechanics of federal voter registration in response to a category of misconduct that empirical research repeatedly shows to be vanishingly rare. Across journalistic investigations, academic databases, partisan compilations, and court-reviewed records, the conclusion converges with unusual consistency: in-person voter impersonation is not a meaningful feature of American elections.

A republic does not redesign its electoral architecture around lightning strikes.

Courts Have Already Weighed the Evidence

In Frank v. Walker, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin scrutinized Wisconsin's strict photo ID law and concluded that a meaningful number of eligible voters lacked the required identification and could not obtain it with reasonable effort.

In Veasey v. Abbott, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, evaluated Texas's Senate Bill 14 and determined that the law had a discriminatory effect under the Voting Rights Act. The court examined extensive legislative and statistical evidence demonstrating that African American and Latino voters were disproportionately less likely to possess the specific forms of identification required. Crucially, the court also observed that the record contained no meaningful evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud sufficient to justify the magnitude of the burden imposed.

The Fourth Circuit reached an even more pointed conclusion when reviewing North Carolina's omnibus voting law. After evaluating legislative history and data on racial disparities in ID possession and voting methods, the court concluded that the law targeted African Americans "with almost surgical precision."

Across jurisdictions, courts have repeatedly described in-person voter impersonation, the central rationale for strict photo ID laws, as virtually nonexistent.

What These Laws Actually Do

In a large-scale audit of approximately 2.1 million ballots in Georgia, Hood and Gillespie examined claims of voter irregularities and found virtually no evidence of systematic fraud capable of altering outcomes.

Claims about widespread non-citizen voting have repeatedly collapsed under validation. Ansolabehere and colleagues demonstrated that apparent "non-citizen voting" findings from CCES data were artifacts of survey misclassification.

Courts reviewing strict identification laws have documented measurable burdens:

• Travel distances to issuing offices
• Fees for underlying documents
• Bureaucratic correction procedures
• Limited office hours

When proof-of-citizenship requirements are layered on top of photo ID rules, the burdens compound:

• Naturalized citizens less likely to carry original naturalization certificates
• Married women whose legal names differ from birth certificates face documentation mismatches
• Elderly citizens born before uniform hospital documentation may lack retrievable birth records
• Rural and low-income citizens face limited DMV access

The SAVE Act Specifically

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act amends the National Voter Registration Act to require documentary proof of United States citizenship before an individual may be registered to vote in federal elections. A signed oath, the backbone of the existing federal registration system for three decades, becomes subordinate to paperwork.

The bill mandates presentation of a REAL ID reflecting citizenship, a passport, specified military documentation, or a government-issued photo ID paired with a certified birth certificate or equivalent record. It conditions registration on physical presentation of these documents and authorizes ongoing federal and state data matching programs. It creates civil liability and criminal exposure for election officials who register applicants lacking documentary proof.

There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. There is substantial evidence that documentary barriers prevent eligible citizens from registering and voting.

The Conclusion: This Debate Is Manufactured

Systematic investigations of alleged voter fraud repeatedly collapse under scrutiny. The News21 review found voter impersonation was vanishingly rare. The Washington Post database identified only a few dozen credible impersonation cases out of more than a billion ballots. Even Republican-affiliated legal organizations show extraordinarily low conviction totals.

A political movement that insists on solving a problem the data cannot substantiate is not engaged in neutral reform. It is redefining the electorate through procedural filtration. When lightning-strike probabilities are invoked to justify structural barriers, the issue is no longer fraud prevention but power allocation.

References

• Ansolabehere, S., Luks, S., & Schaffner, B. F. (2015). The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys. Electoral Studies, 40, 409–410.
• Frank v. Walker, 196 F. Supp. 3d 893 (E.D. Wis. 2016).
• Goel S, Meredith M, Morse M, Rothschild D, Shirani-Mehr H. One Person, One Vote. American Political Science Review. 2020;114(2):456-469.
• Hood, M.V., III and Gillespie, W. (2012). Social Science Quarterly, 93: 76-94.
• Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222 (1985).
• Minnite, L. C. (2010). The Politics of Voter Fraud. Cornell University Press.
• NAACP State Conference of North Carolina v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204 (4th Cir. 2016).
• News21. (2016, August 26). Study finds no evidence of widespread voter fraud. NBC News.
• Veasey v. Abbott, 830 F.3d 216 (5th Cir. 2016) (en banc).