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FTP for TV stations of her remarks is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cortez Masto: \u201cThis bill is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Washington, D.C. \u2013 U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) took to the Senate floor today to reveal the ways in which President Trump\u2019s and Republicans\u2019 SAVE America Act would make it significantly harder for American citizens to vote.<\/p>\n Below are her remarks as prepared for delivery:<\/p>\n Mr. President, I\u2019m joining my Democratic colleagues today in opposition to the SAVE America Act, which is President Trump\u2019s and Republican leadership\u2019s shameful, disingenuous attempt to interfere with our elections and make it harder for American citizens to vote.<\/p>\n Republican leadership has given two reasons why they want this bill to pass.<\/p>\n The first is that \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d are voting in our elections. The second is that it\u2019s just a \u201ccommon sense voter ID bill\u201d.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s break those arguments down.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I would know. I served as Nevada\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Democrats don\u2019t oppose this bill because it would stop noncitizens from voting. In fact, we completely agree that noncitizens should not be voting. That\u2019s why it\u2019s already illegal for noncitizens to vote and why every state already has a process to ensure people who register to vote are citizens.<\/p>\n This bill is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If you want more proof that this is a massively overblown problem: last year, President Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n And what did President Trump\u2019s Department of Justice find? The investigation closed this January, without a single charge of voter fraud.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also curious to me there was no investigation into fraud during the 2024 election, when he won my state \u2013 only for the election he lost.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Now Republican leadership\u2019s second argument, that the SAVE America Act is \u201cjust a voter ID bill\u201d, couldn\u2019t be further from the truth.<\/p>\n The reason this bill is so outrageous is because it goes far beyond showing a driver\u2019s license when you vote. It\u2019s about voter suppression.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how the SAVE America Act hurts our elections:<\/p>\n It mandates that DHS collect voters\u2019 personal information and store it in a federal database that has a history of deleting eligible voters from the voter rolls for no reason.<\/p>\n It makes U.S. citizens jump through unnecessary, burdensome \u2013 and sometimes impossible \u2013 hoops when registering to vote.<\/p>\n It effectively ends widely popular methods of registering to vote to discourage Americans from making their voices heard in our elections.<\/p>\n First, the SAVE America Act would force states to turn over all of their voter data to the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s SAVE Program, a notoriously unreliable program designed to identify \u201cproblem\u201d voters and then get them kicked off the voter rolls. \u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not accurate or effective, and it has already disenfranchised hundreds of perfectly eligible voters.<\/p>\n What does that mean?<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll be turned away. For no reason.<\/p>\n We\u2019re already seeing this happen.<\/p>\n There are states that have entered into agreements with DHS to give them access to their voters\u2019 private information. And we have evidence of American citizen voters being misidentified as noncitizens in those states.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cprove\u201d they are U.S. citizens. Documents like birth certificates that voters in many states have never had to show before.<\/p>\n That means that literally anyone could be kicked off the voter rolls, even if they aren\u2019t tagged by DHS\u2019s archaic system as \u201cproblematic\u201d. \u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This bill requires Americans registering or reregistering to vote to provide documents to \u201cprove you\u2019re a citizen\u201d that thousands of Americans just don\u2019t have access to.<\/p>\n