Long-time readers of mine know I’m obsessed with the first days following the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Because something revolutionary happened immediately—before Section 5 (and pre-clearance) became so effective in stopping suppression tools and tactics, and before the Voting Rights Act led to the end of racial gerrymandering.
What came before those impactful stages of the VRA?
Hint: it wasn’t in a courtroom at all.
It was action….
What action?
The federal government swooped into Southern states and directly registered a huge number of Black voters. And it focused this registration work in the communities most impacted by generations of racist laws and violence—the communities that had most locked out Black voters for the entire century.
And it did this by creating a robust infrastructure to register those long disenfranchised voters.
Activating that part of the VRA was the federal government’s first priority after the VRA was signed in August 1965. As fast as they could, they mustered up and trained an army of federal “registrars” and sent them to the four states and 30 counties in the South with the lowest percentage of registered Black voters (between 2 and 10%), and day in and day out, those registrars energetically registered the people of all those communities. Then they expanded the work elsewhere. And they did all this hard work amid threats and acts of violence.
And because of their spirited effort and dedication, the numbers exploded—revolutionizing democracy in the South in the years that immediately followed, and as cases made their way through the courts:
In the first two months of the work, 110,000 voters were registered. By January 1966, 240,000. By March, 302,000!
(Again, the first major cases upholding the VRA didn’t get decided until later, in the summer of 1966).
And that registration work just kept right on going:
In Mississippi, Black registration went from 10% in 1964 to almost 60% in 1968.
In Alabama, it jumped from 24% to 57%.
By 1967, a majority of Black citizens were registered to vote in 9 of the 13 Southern states.
By 1969, more than one million new voters had registered.
According to the DOJ, in the five years of hard work, nearly as many Black citizens registered to vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina as had registered in the entire century before 1965!
Again, the power and impact of pre-clearance came later…largely after major court cases (coming in 1969 and after) made clear what it meant and how widely it applied.
The surge of new voters came first. It kick-started everything, forever changing the electorate, and the ultimate makeup of elected bodies.
Peeling it All Back
Bottom line: history demonstrates that the scale and process of registering voters directly determines the health of our democracy. When Jim Crow laws made registration impossible for Black voters, there was no democracy in the South. When the VRA reversed that, a pro-democracy revolution followed.
So why do I bring this all up now?
Because Republicans know this history as well as I do. They know that registration of a far greater number (and greater diversity) of the American population served as the gateway to everything else.
And still does.
They know that active voter registration drives, and non-profits and other third party groups registering voters in large numbers, and reforms like automatic voter registration, online voter registration, and even mail-in voter registration, continue to be at the heart of pro-democracy work.
And that scares the hell out of them.
Which makes clamping down on these reforms and widespread registration efforts vital to their anti-democratic agenda today—as vital as that massive registration effort 60 years ago was to kick-starting the voting rights revolution that followed.
This is why some states, like Florida, have added onerous rules to voter registration efforts. And it’s why when the Biden Administration clarified that work-study allowed registration work to take place, Republican Attorneys General immediately objected, and Ohio AG absurdly suggested to Ohio college and university leaders that they might face criminal prosecution for doing so.
And it’s why, among the first pieces of legislation being put before Congress now that they’re in power, is a cynical, brute force bill that would devastate registration efforts and, over time, eliminate millions from America’s democracy. And just as the federal government in the 1960s prioritized those who had been most left out of American democracy then, the current bill targets America’s most vulnerable populations for disproportionate removal from today’s voting process.
Here are the details:
The SAVE Act
Orwell himself would be impressed by the title: the SAVE Act.
But it doesn't save a thing. It just destroys, based on the false narrative that non-citizens are registered and voting in large numbers around the country, which is simply a lie. (Study after study—including comments by GOP officials—have confirmed that the level of non-citizens voting in US elections is infinitesimal; after much hype by Ohio’s Secretary of State, for example, the number turned out to be 6 , out of 11 million citizens, and some cases occurred because government had errantly communicated that these legal residents (non-citizens) could vote).
But to combat this made-up problem (which is also already illegal), the SAVE Act would upend almost every aspect of current voter registration processes in a way that would dramatically reduce the amount of voter registration that takes place.
Specifically, the new registration process would require that any voter registering to vote, or updating their registration, would need to, at the moment of registration, present “documentary proof of United States citizenship.”
Sounds simple, right?
But this procedural change alone throws a wrench in the way that millions of citizens register or update their registration.
Practically speaking, this requirement means the end of:
online voter registration (“This would render the online voter registration systems currently running in 42 states useless, forcing election officials to revert to more far more costly and labor-intensive in-person registration.”)
automatic voter registration (AVR): a popular and effective reform where eligible voters are automatically registered to vote when interacting with certain government agencies (far beyond just BMVs)
mail-in voter registration
voter registration by third parties and non-profit groups (since the best reading of the statute is that government officials are the ones who must see and verify the ID)
campaigns or parties conducting voter registration drives (same reason)
all on-line BMV registrations: while about half of all voter registrations take place through Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the vast majority of those also take place on-line. The SAVE Act would upend that system, because “[a]ll registrations currently collected online, whether through a motor vehicle department or state election’s office, or by mail, would now have to be done in person.”
All of those, gone. (For more details on these obstacles, read this summary from Nonprofit Votes.)
The vast majority of voter registration in America is taking place in these ways “as of 2022, only 5.9% of voters registered to vote in person at election offices.”
In fact, as states have been working hard to modernize voter registration through reforms like online registration and AVR, this law would gut all those reforms.
Some of these methods of registering voters (such as third party registration work) also are the most likely to reach and empower Americans who otherwise won’t participate in democracy. Because many of these non-profits are located and working with these communities in other ways.
Finally, by gutting all these methods of registering, and instead channeling the registration of millions of Americans into in-person registration at elections offices, “The SAVE Act would also overwhelm election officials, leading to long lines for voters and dramatically increased costs for state and local governments.
Amid Non-Stop Purging
And in case you think this will only lead to a decline of net new registrations, think again.
The goal here is clearly to lead to fewer people registered overall.
Why?
Because people are being removed from the rolls all the time. In some cases, because they move. In other cases, because they are in states where active purges are taking place (even for infrequent voting). Ohio, for example, has purged millions of voters over the last decade (often in error, and often because of infrequent voting). And the SAVE Act itself calls for more such purges.
Much of the registration work above is simply a desperate effort to re-register those who’ve been removed from the rolls. A nonstop back and forth—purging and re-registering, purging and re-registering—made even more challenging as purging processes in some states have grown more intense.
Amid this purging, and the regular movement of young and lower-income voters (who therefore need to re-register more often), eliminating most of the ways that America registers voters will clearly result in a net decrease in total voters.
And make no mistake, that is the goal.
Who Will Drop Out?
But we also know perfectly well who will be eliminated from the rolls.
The SAVE Act’s requirement of “documentary proof of United States citizenship” includes passports, birth certificates and other documents that millions lack—and does not include even driver’s licenses or Real IDs.
Which means millions of Americans will end up not registering or voting.
First, the reality is that there will be American citizens who simply don’t re-register because it has been made more complicated or costly. Just as ease of registration (on-line, mail-in, AVR) led to more people registering, complicating registration will naturally lead to less. Even for those that have the required documents, they certainly don’t carry them with them on a regular basis.
But far worse, we also know that the types of ID that would be required by the SAVE Act will disproportionately eliminate from the rolls certain groups of Americans citizens.
To start, according to the Institute for Responsive Government:
around 80% of American women change their name when they get married. “As a result, roughly 33% of all married women lack documents that meet citizenship requirements and reflect their current legal name. Married women make up over a quarter of the electorate, so impeding them from registering to vote has a potentially significant impact on election outcomes.”
Millions of women will likely need to pay to update their identifications in order to vote, according to Glamour: “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law”
“In 2020, 14.10% of survey respondents 80 years old and older reported that they lack access to documents proving citizenship.”
“24.34% of 18-29 year olds reported that they lacked documentation".”
According to Ms., “nearly 9 percent of voting-age Black Americans lack access to birth certificates and passports, compared to 5.5 percent of white Americans.”
Case studies of Hispanic voters showed they were less as likely to have there required identification as White voters;
Voters of lower incomes are also far less likely to possess the required documents.
A June 2025 study found that 10% of voting age American citizens—at least 21 million people—”cannot readily access documentary proof of citizenship.”
And this is not hypothetical.
When Kansas attempted a similar requirement, “more than 31,000 otherwise eligible voters—12% of the total registered voters in the state—were blocked from registering, with the burden falling disproportionately on people of color and the elderly.” When challenged, Kansas officials conceded that “99% of affected voters were U.S. citizens.” That was one reason the law was ultimately struck down.
A similar law in Arizona excludes more than 250,000 citizens from taking part in federal elections there.
Take Action!
A number of organizations are working hard to spread the word about the dangers of the SAVE Act.
A wonderful group called VoteRiders has a one-pager HERE that you can download and share.
VoteRiders has also created a very simple form you can fill out and send to Congress to register your opposition to this horrible law. You can access it HERE.
As always, you can also call your House and Senate members and let them know directly.
Call your Senator HERE.
Call your House member HERE.
Then please share this email so others you know understand the risk, and also take action;
We’ve come too far from those early days after the Voting Rights Act to go back.
Systemically excluding huge chunks of the American population remains unacceptable.
Please do what you can do to help fight back.
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