SAVE America Act Will Infringe On

Constitution, Disenfranchise Voters

To The Reader’s Forum:

The SAVE America Act will undermine American citizens’ voting rights, not help to effectuate their constitutional right to vote in federal elections.

Historically, state laws requiring proof of citizenship to vote in statewide elections, like in Arizona and Kansas, for example, have blocked more eligible voters than noncitizens from exercising their right to vote.

Proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections will likewise do the same. The SAVE America Act would deny American citizens without birth certificates or passports from voting in federal elections, disproportionately impacting low-income individuals, married women who have changed their names, people of color, rural residents, and young voters.

The Constitution, and Laws made in pursuance thereof, are the Supreme Law of the Land. The SAVE America Act would not be such a law; it would not help ensure, at the fundamental level necessary, that our constitutional right to vote in federal elections would be carried out.

Instead, it would do the opposite. It would, in fact, disenfranchise millions of eligible American voters from selecting their president and congressional representatives based on the pretext of preventing widespread voter fraud which, in reality, has proven to be inconsequential.

Maurice F. Baggiano, J.D.,

Jamestown

published legal author,

member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court