FTP for TV stations of her remarks is available here.
Cortez Masto: “This bill is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) took to the Senate floor today to reveal the ways in which President Trump’s and Republicans’ SAVE America Act would make it significantly harder for American citizens to vote.
Below are her remarks as prepared for delivery:
Mr. President, I’m joining my Democratic colleagues today in opposition to the SAVE America Act, which is President Trump’s and Republican leadership’s shameful, disingenuous attempt to interfere with our elections and make it harder for American citizens to vote.
Republican leadership has given two reasons why they want this bill to pass.
The first is that “illegal immigrants” are voting in our elections. The second is that it’s just a “common sense voter ID bill”.
Let’s break those arguments down.
First, I want to make something clear: the United States of America has the most safe and secure elections in the world. It has been proven over and over again.
I would know. I served as Nevada’s Attorney General for two terms, and I helped prosecute voter fraud. In eight years, I can count on two hands how many cases of voter fraud we found, and they were all prosecuted.
Democrats don’t oppose this bill because it would stop noncitizens from voting. In fact, we completely agree that noncitizens should not be voting. That’s why it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote and why every state already has a process to ensure people who register to vote are citizens.
This bill is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has a database of noncitizens voting that shows there have only been 77 cases between 1999 and 2023. 77 cases in 25 years! And each one of those individuals was investigated by the proper authorities.
In Nevada, a local news investigation found that out of more than 7 million votes cast in our elections since 2008, the number of votes cast by noncitizens was exactly two. Not two thousand, not two hundred. Two.
If you want more proof that this is a massively overblown problem: last year, President Trump’s own Justice Department opened an investigation over alleged voter fraud in Nevada during the 2020 presidential election. President Trump lost the state of Nevada by more than 33,000 votes that year.
And what did President Trump’s Department of Justice find? The investigation closed this January, without a single charge of voter fraud.
It’s also curious to me there was no investigation into fraud during the 2024 election, when he won my state – only for the election he lost.
We have the most safe and secure elections in the world, and noncitizens are not voting in them. And in the extremely rare cases when they do, they get caught.
Now Republican leadership’s second argument, that the SAVE America Act is “just a voter ID bill”, couldn’t be further from the truth.
The reason this bill is so outrageous is because it goes far beyond showing a driver’s license when you vote. It’s about voter suppression.
Here’s how the SAVE America Act hurts our elections:
It mandates that DHS collect voters’ personal information and store it in a federal database that has a history of deleting eligible voters from the voter rolls for no reason.
It makes U.S. citizens jump through unnecessary, burdensome – and sometimes impossible – hoops when registering to vote.
It effectively ends widely popular methods of registering to vote to discourage Americans from making their voices heard in our elections.
First, the SAVE America Act would force states to turn over all of their voter data to the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE Program, a notoriously unreliable program designed to identify “problem” voters and then get them kicked off the voter rolls.
It’s not accurate or effective, and it has already disenfranchised hundreds of perfectly eligible voters.
What does that mean?
It means Americans who have already been determined by their states to be citizens, and who have potentially been voting for years or even decades without issue, could be removed from state lists of eligible voters. And when they show up to vote like normal, they’ll be turned away. For no reason.
We’re already seeing this happen.
There are states that have entered into agreements with DHS to give them access to their voters’ private information. And we have evidence of American citizen voters being misidentified as noncitizens in those states.
If this bill goes into effect, who knows how many Americans would be kicked off the list of eligible voters from their state, only to show up on Election Day and be told they need to re-register and produce numerous documents proving they are a citizen?
Taking it one step further, the SAVE America Act mandates that states need to remove eligible voters off their list if they have not presented the documents mandated under the bill to “prove” they are U.S. citizens. Documents like birth certificates that voters in many states have never had to show before.
That means that literally anyone could be kicked off the voter rolls, even if they aren’t tagged by DHS’s archaic system as “problematic”.
For those American citizens who do get kicked off the voter roll, you would have to re-register, which the SAVE America Act makes infinitely harder for Americans to do.
This bill requires Americans registering or reregistering to vote to provide documents to “prove you’re a citizen” that thousands of Americans just don’t have access to.
If you were a victim of DHS’s erroneous voter roll purges and need to re-register to vote, or if you simply want to register to vote for the first time, this bill would require a document that confirms that you were born in the United States or that you’re a naturalized citizen.
Does a driver’s license alone do that? No. Neither does REAL ID for my state and for most states.
Even presenting your birth certificate wouldn’t be enough to prove citizenship. Americans would be required to present their birth certificate and a valid government issued photo ID card, like a driver’s license.
Now, a passport would be enough to prove citizenship, but half of Americans don’t have a passport. Half.
That’s true in Nevada, too. Roughly 56% of Nevadans have a passport. That means nearly half of the people in my state would have to have their birth certificate or other documentary proof of citizenship on hand.
And if they wanted to buy a passport, it would cost $165. That’s not an amount most Nevadans can just shell out, especially with prices so high these days.
I hope if you’re one of the 146 million Americans who doesn’t have an up-to-date passport, that you have your birth certificate and another government issued photo ID readily available.
But if you’re among the 21 million Americans who don’t – maybe because they don’t drive or they simply don’t have their birth certificate – then Republicans who support this bill want to tell you that you can’t register to vote.
Let’s dive into this part of the bill a little more. The documentary proof of citizenship required under this bill is simply nonsensical.
For example, let’s say a Native American shows up to an election office ready to register to vote. They have their Tribal ID in tow – that wouldn’t be enough.
That Tribal ID would have to be an enhanced version issued by the Department Homeland Security, which most Tribe members don’t have. Or if their Tribal ID was issued by their Tribe, it would have to display that they were born in the U.S., which many don’t.
Let’s pick another example. Say you are a service member in our military, and you take your military identification card to register to vote. But under this bill, unless you also present your United States military record of service showing you were born in the United States or your birth certificate, you don’t have the proper documentation.
How about naturalized citizens? If they presented their Naturalization Certificate, they would also need to show a government-issued photo ID card. This restrictive portion of the bill would create barriers for all kinds of eligible Americans looking to follow the rules and register to vote.
Keep in mind, this is not just for new voters registering for the first time. If you have to update your registration and your name doesn’t match the documents you present, this bill would make you take additional steps to prove your citizenship.
For example, if you’re one of the 69 million married women who has changed your last name, but you don’t have an up-to-date passport, and you’re updating your registration to vote because you moved, you might have to go through this onerous process just to prove who you are.
If your name doesn’t match in all of the documentation you provided, you’d have to provide more documents or sign an affidavit.
If you can’t get that all done – sorry, you don’t get to vote. That is what President Trump and Republican leadership want.
Americans’ right to vote is guaranteed by the Constitution! We should not be making it harder for Americans to participate in our elections!
It’s bad enough that this bill has an unnecessary documentary proof of citizenship requirement. What’s even worse is that if you want to register to vote, you have to present that proof of citizenship in person.
That means nobody would be able to register to vote online or by mail. Think about the implications of that.
Voter registration drives that encourage Americans to participate in our elections would grind to a halt. That would impact Black and Latino voters the most, as well as those who didn’t graduate from high school. Those groups are most likely to rely on third-party voter registration.
Many citizens in Nevada register to vote at their DMV. If you think the lines are long at the DMV now, just think of the chaos and confusion this requirement could cause.
And if you live in a rural area, like many Nevadans do, and your nearest County Clerk’s Office is hours away, you have to figure out how to get there in order to register to vote.
Nevada only has 2 urban counties – Clark, where Las Vegas is, and Washoe, where Reno is. The other 15 counties are almost entirely rural, and they have about 240,000 active registered voters in them.
If you’re a rural Nevadan and you have to register to vote or update your registration, Republicans who support this bill want you to spend a day driving to do it. It’s cruel.
I’ll give you an example. In Nye County, Nevada, someone who lives on or near Duckwater Reservation would have to travel roughly 270 miles round-trip to show an election official at the Nye County Clerk’s office their proof of citizenship. That’s one of the longest roundtrip journeys across the country to register to vote!
It’s no wonder that in 2022, only 5.9% of Americans registered to vote in person.
Why? Because it’s inconvenient and unnecessary when we already have proven, effective safeguards in place to ensure you are who you say you are when you register to vote.
But this bill would force all Americans to take that burden on if they want to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It’s absurd.
Not to mention, if it were to pass, this legislation would go into effect immediately without giving states any additional resources to implement these complex provisions.
Most bills that significantly alter our systems give plenty of lead time to ensure a smooth transition into the new system. But not this bill. President Trump and Republican leadership want to make sure it’s done in time for the upcoming midterms. Because they are afraid of American voters using their voices to speak out against them.
We all know why Republican leadership wants the SAVE America Act to pass so badly: they think they will lose their majorities in the midterms. Because their current policies are extremely unpopular with Americans.
Raising costs instead of lowering them, kicking millions of Americans off their health care, and starting an unauthorized war with no exit strategy is an awful record for Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
And through our elections, Americans have the chance to make their opposition to his policies heard at the ballot box.
But Trump’s Republican Party is trying to prevent them from voting. They’re trying to choke off American votes in a desperate bid to stay in power.
This bill goes beyond bad faith – it’s just vile.
Instead of trying to make Americans’ lives better and passing legislation people actually want, instead of supporting our democracy and our Constitution, President Trump’s Republican followers now want to pass this bill and make it extremely difficult for millions of Americans to exercise their right to vote.
Why? Because President Trump is afraid of being held accountable by the American people.
The SAVE America Act would require states to turn over voter information to DHS, it would kick millions of eligible voters off the rolls, it would make it infinitely harder for Americans to register to vote, and it would cause chaos in our states.
And, it wouldn’t solve a single problem, especially not the ones President Trump and Republican leaders pretend exist. Just the opposite – it would create huge problems for our elections in every state across the country, resulting in voter suppression.
Nevadans and all Americans deserve better than this cowardly bill from Republicans trying to run from the issues they created for themselves. My Democratic colleagues and I will not let it pass.
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