Senator Lisa Murkowski’s Rock Solid Reason to Vote Against the SAVE Act

You have to be purposefully ignorant or wish to steal the election to disagree with Murkowski.

The SAVE America Act Is Purposely Flawed

Senator Murkowski explains Why I’m Voting Against the SAVE America Act That’s a free link.

President Trump made his case for the SAVE America Act on Thursday, claiming the security of our elections is at stake.

While I support the bill’s core tenets—ensuring that only American citizens vote and requiring identification when voting—I remain opposed to it. Why? Because it would have serious negative effects in Alaska, and the current text doesn’t allow for the time and resources needed for proper implementation.

As written, the SAVE America Act isn’t a simple fix to safeguard elections, as proponents claim. It would impose costly new barriers and prevent some, perhaps many, from voting, while also creating chaos before the November elections.

Part of the problem lies in the bill’s mechanics. Right now, Alaskans can register to vote online. There is no evidence of significant fraud anywhere in that system. Yet the bill would effectively end online voter registration by requiring voters to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in person to an election official.

That wouldn’t be a major obstacle in most places in the Lower 48, but Alaska has only six election offices where that requirement could clearly be met. Six places in a state more than twice the size of Texas, where roughly 80% of our communities, and about 20% of our population, aren’t connected by road.

Even in cities such as Ketchikan and Kodiak, which have Department of Motor Vehicle offices where Alaskans can register to vote under current law, the logistics would be daunting. Under the bill, they would become completely unworkable in more remote communities.

Say you are an 18-year-old living in Savoonga, on a remote island in the Bering Sea, who wants to register to vote for the first time. If the SAVE America Act passed, your only option would be to buy a ticket on Bering Air to Nome, which runs about $780 round-trip. A night at the Aurora Inn would be more than $300. So, not counting food and local transportation, it would cost more than $1,000 just to register to vote.

Or maybe you’re a fisherman in Unalaska, out on the Aleutian Islands. The flight to Anchorage—the closest election office, some 800 miles away—would cost about $1,500 round-trip. You would also need a hotel, cabs and food while in Anchorage because it would be impossible to fly in, register and return home the same day.

These examples assume you have on hand the documents necessary to prove your citizenship. But take one more: You are an 85-year-old Native elder born in your parents’ house, 18 years before statehood. Getting a certified copy of your birth certificate, especially if you have never had one before, would be incredibly difficult.

Many Native people rely on tribal identification to register to vote, but the SAVE America Act would require the card to show that the applicant’s place of birth was in the U.S., along with a photo and expiration date. While many tribes’ identification cards have a photo, not all have expiration dates and few include a place of birth.

Only about half of Alaskans have passports. And many Alaskans—including women who have changed their names after marrying or divorcing—wait one to two months to receive certified copies of their vital records.

Beyond registration is voting itself. Alaska is a “no excuse” state, meaning you can vote by mail without providing a reason. More than 50,000 Alaskans did in the 2024 general election. Voting by mail is an important alternative in Alaska, particularly in small communities that don’t have places or poll workers for in-person voting. Given the unpredictability of weather in November, many Alaskans prefer the ease and reliability of voting by mail.

The SAVE America Act as the text currently stands would add strict ID mandates to mail-in voting. President Trump is pushing for the final version to go even further—essentially canceling mail-in voting unless a voter falls into one of four specific exceptions, such as military service. This despite the absence of any significant abuses of these systems in Alaska or across the nation.

I have expressed my concerns with the SAVE America Act for months. I filed several amendments when it came to the Senate floor. No effort has been made to correct its flaws.

I’ve also asked for the effective date of the legislation to be pushed back to give all states enough time for implementation. As written, the bill would take effect immediately—but it is unreasonable to expect immediate compliance.

This bill would force many states to modify their election laws. Some legislatures might need special sessions to do that. Thousands of local jurisdictions would have to implement new processes and find workers willing to risk being personally sued. Under the bill’s private right of action, individuals or groups could sue election officials if they believe verification requirements aren’t being strictly enforced.

Even if federal resources are provided through the budget reconciliation process to help facilitate these changes, it will take weeks or months for those dollars to arrive and much longer to overhaul state voting processes.

When allowed to speak candidly, state election officials from both parties have been clear: Provisions of the SAVE America Act won’t work, especially in the time frame envisioned by advocates.

The president is right that we should protect the security of our elections. But we can’t make it harder for American citizens to cast their ballots, because free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic.

Ms. Murkowski, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alaska.

Not Just Alaska

Alaska alone provides sufficient reason to be against the SAVE Act. It is one of the reasons I am confident the Supreme Court would strike the act as unconstitutional.

But this goes beyond Alaska to married women whose names have changed to issues with native Americans.

I agree with Murkowski on better procedures. But a drivers license is purposely insufficient.

Under the act, voter names must match birth certificate and if they don’t proof must be made in person.

Again, this is on purpose to disenfranchise women and minorities who heavily vote Democratic.

I am sick of the disgusting liars who claim this is about voter ID when it clearly isn’t.

The SAVE Act Is Unconstitutional

1. Congress Lacks Authority to Impose Voter Qualifications.

The U.S. Constitution delegates the power to set voter qualifications—such as age, residency, and citizenship—to the states, with limited federal overrides via amendments (e.g., the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, or age).

The SAVE Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirement effectively establishes a new national qualification for voting by mandating documentation that verifies citizenship status, which exceeds Congress’s role under the Elections Clause. This clause allows Congress to regulate procedural aspects like how elections are conducted, but not who is eligible to participate.

In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), the Supreme Court struck down a similar state-level proof-of-citizenship requirement for federal elections, ruling it conflicted with the NVRA’s simpler attestation process.

By amending the NVRA to impose such a requirement nationwide, the SAVE Act is overreach.

2. Violation of the National Voter Registration Act and Supremacy Clause Issues

Although the SAVE Act seeks to amend the NVRA, it would conflict with the NVRA’s original intent to streamline registration and reduce barriers.

The NVRA requires only a sworn attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury, and courts have invalidated stricter state measures as preempted by federal law.

Kansas’s similar proof-of-citizenship law, for instance, was ruled unconstitutional after blocking over 30,000 eligible voters.

The SAVE Act’s nationwide mandate could be seen as an end-run around these rulings, potentially violating the Supremacy Clause by forcing states to adopt federal standards that disrupt their own election administration without clear constitutional justification. This preemption of state processes, including online and mail-in registration, would impose unfunded burdens on local officials and expose them to legal risks, further straining the federal-state balance.

3. Undue Burden on the Fundamental Right to Vote

Voting is a fundamental right protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and laws imposing severe burdens must survive strict scrutiny—meaning they must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of eligible citizens, especially women and minorities who lack easy access to required documents.

Estimates suggest 21 million Americans don’t have readily available proof of citizenship, with disproportionate impacts on women (due to name changes), low-income voters, rural residents, students, older adults, and minorities.

Requiring in-person submission and excluding common IDs like student or state-issued cards adds barriers, potentially amounting to a modern poll tax if obtaining documents incurs costs (violating the 24th Amendment).

Non-citizen voting is already illegal and exceedingly rare (e.g., audits in Georgia and elsewhere found negligible instances), so the Act’s burdens far outweigh any demonstrated need, failing constitutional tests under cases like Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983).

The SAVE America Act Backfire

The Wall Street Journal editorial board gets this one correct. Please consider The SAVE America Act Backfire

President Trump broke into prime-time TV on Thursday night to talk to the nation about election security, but it must have been a letdown for anybody expecting a thrilling plot twist in Mr. Trump’s long yarn about his 2020 defeat. Instead he made a sales pitch for a bill that can’t pass, using doubts it wouldn’t address.

Mr. Trump released documents that he said show vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems, and some of them are real, though they run the gamut. He said voter files on millions of people, including names, addressees and party affiliations, “have been bought, stolen or hacked by China.” A 2020 intelligence memo advised that adversaries “have the capability to compromise” election infrastructure, especially “registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites.”

But since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” it says. “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” Achieving it across many jurisdictions “would be difficult” and “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

Mr. Trump went on to say that CIA reporting indicates Venezuela’s dictatorship conspired to rig its own election and “digitally alter vote totals.” He presented this as proof of concept that such a thing is possible. Sorry, the state of Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024, isn’t Venezuela, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn’t Nicolás Maduro.

The public likes voter ID, with a poll last year finding 83% of adults, and 71% of Democrats, favor it. Yet the SAVE America Act goes further, rendering most driver’s licenses insufficient to register to vote, and that’s to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s push to override laws in many GOP states—Florida, Georgia, most of the Midwest—that offer mail ballots for convenience.

In a floor speech Thursday, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis argued that even if Congress whooped through the bill, there isn’t time to implement it before November. By his reckoning, the U.S. has about 10,000 county clerks or municipal entities that carry out America’s decentralized elections. The midterms are barely 100 days away, early voting sooner. “The math doesn’t work,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

Mr. Tillis isn’t against ID rules, and he helped pass North Carolina’s. “We should figure out a way to get every state to get to voter ID,” he said. Yet he was unsparing toward Congress’s proponents of the SAVE America Act. “Mr. President, these people are misleading you if they’re telling you that this can be implemented by November,” he said. “This seems like a legit proposal, but it isn’t.”

Republicans should be campaigning on what they want to do with two more years in power. There are ways to improve voting integrity, but Mr. Tillis is right that it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest. In fact, the intel memo Mr. Trump declassified warned this is what a U.S. adversary might do. “Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering US elections,” it says, “which could allow false narratives to gain traction.”

That’s dated Jan. 15, 2020. Now there’s some prescient intelligence.

For further discussion, please consider Three Reasons the Save Act Is Unconstitutional

There should be no votes for this purposeful attempt to seal the election.

Fortunately, the bill is dead.