The facts:

The debate over the SAVE Act often gets framed as a simple choice between election security and access. But when you look at the evidence, the tradeoff appears heavily one-sided: the burden on eligible citizens is potentially enormous, while the fraud it would prevent appears comparatively tiny. Confirmed cases of individual voter fraud are rare, and documented non-citizen voting remains an exceptionally small problem in the available data.

That gap matters. Estimates discussed earlier suggest that more than 21 million eligible citizens could struggle to register or update their registration if documentary proof of citizenship were required, while broader documentation barriers could affect far more people. By contrast, the number of proven ineligible votes actually found in public reports is tiny relative to the total electorate, especially when measured against the roughly 174 million registered voters in 2024.

The practical ratio is striking. Even if one uses the most conservative “affected citizens” estimate, the number of people who could face new barriers is in the millions, while the number of fraudulent votes the law might stop is likely to be only a very tiny fraction of that. Put plainly, the SAVE Act looks less like a targeted anti-fraud measure and more like a broad paperwork filter that would mostly fall on lawful voters.

That burden would not be shared equally. Voters most likely to be hit include people whose names have changed, people without easy access to birth records or passports, rural residents, low-income citizens, and others who already face friction in navigating government systems. In that sense, the law could convert ordinary document access into a voting barrier for eligible Americans.

A better approach would focus on making proof documents free, fast, and easy to obtain if the government insists on requiring them at all. Otherwise, the cost of preventing a very small number of improper votes may be a much larger number of lawful citizens losing the ability to participate.

In perspective, the SAVE Act could impose new barriers on more than 8% of legally eligible voters, while its impact on fraud would likely amount to only a fraction of 1% of votes cast. By example, one analysis in Pennsylvania found fraudulent ballots amounted to just 0.000039% of ballots cast.

Source:
 

1. Brennan Center for Justice, “Noncitizen Voting is Vanishingly Rare,” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-vanishingly-rare

2. Brennan Center for Justice, “Noncitizen Voting Is Already Illegal — and Vanishingly Rare,” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/noncitizen-voting-already-illegal-and-vanishingly-rare

3. Brennan Center for Justice, “Heritage Fraud Database: An Assessment,” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/heritage-fraud-database-assessment

4. Cato Institute, “Toughening Laws on Noncitizen Voting: Evaluating the SAVE Act,” https://www.cato.org/blog/evaluating-save-act-noncitizen-voting

5. Cato Institute, “Federal Power Grab Threatens Election Integrity,” https://www.cato.org/news-releases/federal-power-grab-threatens-election-integrity

6. The Heritage Foundation, Election Fraud Database, https://electionfraud.heritage.org

7. U.S. Census Bureau, “Birth Records,” https://www.census.gov/about/policies/foia/age_search_and_birth_records/birth_records.html

8. USAGov, “How to get a certified copy of a U.S. birth certificate,” https://www.usa.gov/birth-certificate