The Fly They Want to Swat

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

The SAVE Act is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and everyone knows it

Trump told Republicans that if the SAVE Act passed, they “would never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” He has quite a knack for saying the quiet part out loud, and no one bats an eye.

The SAVE Act, which the Senate is debating right now, is being sold as a way to stop noncitizen voting. That sounds reasonable until you look at how much noncitizen voting is actually happening. Utah spent nine months doing a full citizenship review of all 2.1 million voters on its rolls. They found one – one – noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. The Heritage Foundation, which is not exactly a liberal organization, has been cataloging voter fraud since 1982 and has managed to find 1,620 total instances in over 40 years of elections. In that same period, roughly 1.5 billion ballots were cast. Their own database makes the case against this bill.

The problem the SAVE Act is supposed to solve doesn’t exist. There aren’t non-citizens who are willing to end up in a CONCENTRATION CAMP in order to cast a SINGLE vote. Sorry – that’s not a thing.

But the disenfranchisement the law would create is very real.

About 21 million eligible American citizens don’t have easy access to documents that would prove their citizenship under this bill. Your driver’s license probably won’t work. A REAL ID won’t work either unless it specifically says you’re a citizen, and only five states issue those. For most people, that means a passport or a birth certificate. Roughly 146 million Americans don’t have a valid passport.

And it makes things specifically harder for married women: 84 percent of women who marry change their surnames, which means their birth certificate doesn’t match their legal name. The bill, as written, has no provision for a marriage certificate. So about 69 million American women could walk into a voter registration office with their birth certificate and be turned away.

We know how this plays out because Kansas already ran this experiment. Before they implemented a proof-of-citizenship requirement, noncitizen registration in Kansas was around 0.002% of voters. After the law kicked in, it prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens from registering. Thirty-one thousand real Americans blocked so the state could screen out a rounding error.

And that was the old version of the bill.

What passed the House in February 2026 on a 218-213 vote adds photo ID for mail-in voting, requires states to hand their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security, and takes effect immediately. No phase-in. No time for election officials to figure out how to implement it. If it passes the Senate before the midterms, it applies to the midterms.

Trump wants to go further. He’s been calling the House version “watered down” and insisting the Senate add a near-total ban on mail-in voting and unrelated transgender restrictions, which he seems to have decided are the price of doing business. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been pretty honest that he doesn’t have the votes to pass it, especially not the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Even the National Review editorial board came out against it, calling it swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

So, how the hell did we get here? Well, it’s a fun story!

In 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene was threatening to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker. Johnson needed a lifeline, so he flew to Mar-a-Lago for a press conference with Trump where they announced this bill. Greene backed off. Johnson kept his gavel. The SAVE Act was born as a political transaction between two men who needed something from each other, dressed up as election security.

It failed in 2024. It failed again in 2025. Now it’s back, bigger each time, with Trump threatening to withhold his endorsement from any Republican senator who votes against it.

Each version of this bill is broader, harder to fight, and closer to passing than the last. The Senate advanced it to the floor for debate today – 51 to 48. Still a far cry from the 60 votes needed for it to pass.

But in the world we are living in – never discount the number of people who can be fooled into shooting themselves in the foot – because I’d bet a whole dollar that those 13% of women who didn’t take their husbands’ last names ain’t Republicans.

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