WaPo Admits Many Democrat Voters Can’t Prove They’re Citizens

Not a single Democrat in the Senate is willing to support the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, and a new op-ed from The Washington Post might just explain why.

The SAVE America Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID to cast a ballot in federal elections. The current “safeguard” preventing noncitizens from registering to vote and voting is a tiny square box on the federal registration form asking applicants to attest they are telling the truth about their citizenship status. In other words, the honor system.

The legislation passed the House (with a single Democrat voting alongside Republicans) but has stalled in the Republican controlled Senate, with a few RINOs and the entire Democrat apparatus opposing the election integrity legislation.

But perhaps Democrats are opposed to the common sense election integrity measure because the legislation would endanger New Mexico and turn the battleground of Nevada into a solid Republican state, according to analysis from Yale Law School Professor Ian Ayres and Yale research fellow Jacob Slaughter.

The two explain in their op-ed that they estimate at the national level, “89 percent of Democrats and 90 percent of Republicans hold qualifying citizenship documents, a difference that is not statistically significant.”

That seemingly meaningless 1 percent difference, however, would actually be state-flipping, according to Ayres and Slaughter.

“But because the composition of the electorate varies across states, national parity masks meaningful state-level variation — and what we find, looking state by state, is that the bill may significantly advantage Republicans in a few key ones.”

Ayres and Slaughter estimate that Democrats are 13 percentage points “less likely than Republicans to hold qualifying registration documents” in New Mexico. And while Ayres and Slaughter estimate the passage of the SAVE America Act would only have “modest” consequences for the midterms because those currently registered to vote would be “unaffected,” “as more people would need to register after moving, changing their names or reaching voting age, this document shortfall could flip New Mexico to an electorate where Republicans have a 3.3-percentage-point advantage.”

Ayres and Slaughter see the GOP having a similar advantage in the battleground state of Nevada. Their research shows that Democrats are 5.3 percentage points less likely than Republicans to have the required documents, and they project that passage of the legislation “would push [Nevada] from battleground to comfortably Republican.”

“Nationally, the overall effect leans Republican: Eight of 15 swing states show rightward shifts, and the only statistically significant results favor Republicans,” Ayres and Slaughter wrote.

Ayres and Slaughter ultimately conclude that the “benefits [of the legislation] are minuscule.” They make this claim despite constant evidence that noncitizens do vote, and despite admitting there are around 4 million currently registered voters lacking documentary proof of citizenship — that is, millions of people on the rolls who may not be able to prove they are citizens because maybe they’re not.

Perhaps Ayres and Slaughter only see it that way because the effect wouldn’t be “minuscule” or neutral for Democrats.