Walter Olson
Number 22 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focused on the SAVE Act, Save America Act, and Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act. The three bills are often confused, and details have changed and indeed keep changing (explainer and chart on the differences, not necessarily up to date, from Issue One).
All three of these bills are premised on the factual claim that voting fraud is rampant in federal elections today. In a new Cato podcast, colleague Stephen Richer joins me to discuss why this isn’t just so, why MAGA claims of noncitizen and impersonation fraud keep not panning out, and where the remaining pockets of fraud can typically be found. (Related from Stephen here and here.) Meanwhile, though many states have now handed over their voter rolls to Washington, the Department of Justice has been unable so far to generate significant findings of noncitizen voting, let alone any significant conspiracy to prosecute over it. [Washington Post]
Derek Muller has done a deep dive and is not as alarmed at the contents of the House-passed bill as some others, noting that it “creates a ‘process for those without documentary proof’ and a separate one for name discrepancies” and that, in his reading, it won’t force existing registrants to re-register between now and November. For that, among other reasons, he doesn’t see it as greatly changing the makeup of the 2026 electorate, although he notes the near-standardless regulatory discretion that would be entrusted to the presidentially appointed Election Assistance Commission. But Prof. Muller says that requiring an in-person-before-an-official dimension to all new registrations would mark “a pretty big shift not just for ‘voter registration drives’ generally but for all rural voters in particular.” He also expects that most states would have to follow Arizona into a split-roll system with two or even three divisions (“state-only” voters, voters qualified to vote in both federal and state elections, and perhaps “federal-only” voters as well).
“I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind.” [UCLA lawprof Rick Hasen, prominent election law specialist, Slate] Related from Cato colleague Ilya Somin: “I, too, underrated the benefits of electoral decentralization.” Those Framers were no slouches! Prof. Muller, cited above, believes the pending bills will serve to commit Republicans to a nationalized election model that Democrats will be happy to use toward their own purposes when back in power, following the failed efforts to enact the old H.R. 1/S. 1/For the People Act.
Trump claims 89 percent bipartisan support for his demands. How about if we check the actual polls? [FiftyPlusOne, Mary Radcliffe, and G. Elliott Morris]
Alaska elections chief “says the state ‘will clean’ its voter roll of people identified by the Department of Justice, putting them on track for removal.” A model for what DOJ has in mind once all the state voter rolls pass into its hands? [James Brooks, Alaska Beacon]
Critical voices on the Right: one notes “unworkable timelines” and “drafting problems” and sees “urgency and partisan messaging substituting for deliberation and pragmatic design” [Matt Germer. R Street]. “The best and most functional systems use existing government infrastructure—DMV databases, state and federal records—to verify citizenship on the back end, rather than placing requirements on voters at the registration desk. ” [Jonathan Madison, Civic Right] Georgia “achieves the same goal of the SAVE America Act of preventing noncitizen voting—while imposing much less red tape on eligible American voters.” [Chris McIsaac, Civic Right] The SAVE Act “continues a step in the wrong direction in federalizing elections,” and while the existing National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) goes too far in constraining states’ verification efforts, Congress could fix that in a much smaller bill. [National Review editors]