The Republicans in Congress are at it again, trying to pass the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act).
First, it would require that if your address changes, for whatever reason, even if you just move from one apartment to another, you'd have to repeat the process of registering to vote from scratch, no options to allow you to just update your current voter registration.
Second, you could only register to vote in-person, at a state voter registration office, so no more 'motor-voter' option.
But here's the big one: only three forms of ID would be acceptable when registering to vote; a valid passport, a certified copy of your birth certificate or your naturalization papers. Drivers licenses wouldn't count, not even a 'real ID', because it does not indicate your place of birth. Neither would a student ID, a military ID nor even a gun permit which has been used in some states, all because they don't show where you were born. In fact, the only 'photo ID' generally available to an individual which shows your place of birth is your passport, and less than half of the citizens of the US has ever been issued a passport.
So if you don't have a passport, what do you have to do? You have to produce a 'certified' copy of your birth certificate. By certified, they mean it has to be one which was issued by your local records office and if must include an embossed stamp showing that it's an original copy. Xerox copes, FAX's or PDF's printed from the internet would not count, it would have to be an actual physical copy from the your local records office with the visible emboss present. And since it doesn't have a photo, you would then have to supplement that with something like a drivers license or state ID card. Which brings us to the next big problem. Married women.
The vast majority of American women take their husband's last name when they get married, which means that the name that appears on their birth certificate won't match the name of their supplemental ID, such as a drivers license or a state ID. This means that these married women would have to produce additional documentation such as a marriage license or papers from a court showing that they've legally changed their name. And lets not even get into what happens with women who've been widowed or divorced and have remarried, because they would have to produce a 'paper trail' to prove that their current name, as it appears on their drivers license or state ID, can be traced back to the name that appears on their 'certified' birth certificate.
And remember, this entire process would have to be repeated, from scratch, every time your mailing address changed, even if it was simply moving from one apartment in a building to another, or if you're a student, changing your dorm room. Or if you're in the military, getting reassigned to a new posting.
And ostensibly, this is being done to stop non-citizens from voting, something which happens so infrequently that you can barely represent if as a percentage of votes cast, something like 0.0001%, per a recent Brennan Center study.
OCU
