Democrat senators claim it is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy that the SAVE America Act requires states to share voter rolls and requisite identifying information with the federal government in order to check for noncitizens, but many of their states already share the same data with left-wing third party organizations.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., argued against the bill on the Senate floor, stating, “States would be required to report their full voter rolls to Department of Homeland Security and certify that there are no non-citizens on their list. And the federal government can require, then, states to purge their voter roles of any suspected non-citizens.”
“The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has said that DHS’s desire to turn the SAVE program into a de facto national citizenship registry raises significant civil liberties concerns,” he stated, appearing to argue against the federal government being able to know who is in the country illegally or which noncitizens are attempting to vote.
“Would you trust them with your name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, and biometric information like height, weight, hair color, and eye color? The SAVE Act asks you to place that trust in them. I personally would not,” he added.
But Rhode Island, Reed’s home state, already shares all that information with left-wing election groups like Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and by extension the Zuckbucks-linked Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR). The state also solicited voter registration from noncitizens at the behest of ERIC, as The Federalist reported.
Reed’s office refused to respond to two requests for comment about the inconsistency, or why he has an issue with removing noncitizens from voter rolls.
Sending the solicitations, called “eligible but unregistered” (EBU) voter mailers, are a requirement of membership in ERIC, which purports to be a multi-state voter roll “management system, despite only mandating that voters be added and never removed,” Ned Jones, director of the Citizens Election Research Center at the Election Integrity Network, a project of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, told The Federalist.
“Member states send ERIC a list of anyone who interact[s] with the DMV, both citizens and non-citizens. ERIC shares the information with CEIR and sends the state a list of EBUs to contact, with voter registration information,” Jones said.
The system has resulted in Colorado’s secretary of state sending 30,000 noncitizens the registration mailers.
Reed actually went through a litany of states where noncitizens had been registered or even voted in his speech. While his point was to falsely claim it is a vanishingly rare phenomenon that is statistically meaningless in the results of an election, the fact remains that thousands — not dozens, as Reed claims — of noncitizens have been registered to vote in the United States.
For example, the Biden administration sued Virginia for removing about 6,300 noncitizens from voter rolls. Alabama had about 3,251 persons who had been given noncitizen identification numbers on its voter rolls.
Part of the problem is that many states — particularly blue, ERIC-member states — do not have safeguards to ensure noncitizens are not making it on their voter rolls in the first place.
Rhode Island, for example, simultaneously maintains that it is a felony to register to vote as a noncitizen and that it is not legal to “ask for proof of citizenship” status upon registration, requiring a mere “attestation that the signer is a citizen.”
“They must, and I quote, swear or affirm that I am a US citizen, then check a yes or no box for whether they are citizens of the United States,” Reed explained on the Senate floor. “They are warned on the registration form, a simple one-page document that quote, If you sign this form and know it to be false, you can be convicted and fined up to $5,000 or jailed for up to 10 years.”
ERIC has 25 member states and the District of Columbia — only three are run by Republicans. Each of the Democrat-run states has senators arguing against passing the SAVE America Act.
As The Federalist has reported, Democrat operatives control the voter rolls of these states, and uses states funds to their political benefit, like registering Democrat voters and increasing their turnout.
Its founder, David Becker — who also founded CEIR — has tried to convince Americans that noncitizen voting was not happening. He was also a lobbyist for the George Soros dark money-funded People for the American Way, which runs the anti-conservative “Right Wing Watch.”
Part of Reed’s speech was attempting to make the argument that there is a “real risk that states will take a conservative approach to compliance and require all their voters to re-register with documentary proof of citizenship.”
He also claimed that documents to prove citizenship are extremely difficult to obtain, and that someone who waits until it is close to Election Day could be stuck without being able to register because they needed to contact the proper office to obtain a birth certificate, for example.
His claim that obtaining identification documents is difficult is false. One of the barriers, Reed claims, is that many Americans’ parents hold their birth certificates, Social Security Numbers, and other identifying information, making it difficult to acquire for purposes of proving citizenship to register to vote.
Reed apparently thinks a simple phone call to one’s parents asking them to mail those items is a significant enough impediment to justify having thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls and casting ballots.
In the vast majority of cases, obtaining the required documentation is extremely easy.
Moreover, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, points out, “the SAVE America Act helps Americans to prove their citizenship & identity without spending a dime.”
“When all else fails, if you don’t have documentation establishing the information on your birth certificate, or what would be in a passport, or otherwise, the bill contains a provision requiring each state to allow an alternative mechanism by which someone can, by attestation, issue a sworn statement establishing the critical facts underlying their citizenship,” Lee said. “It then puts the onus on the state to follow up on that and to determine the authenticity of it.”
If voting truly is the sacred right that Democrats and Republicans alike say it is, asking citizens to go through an additional, yet simple, step or two should not be a deterrent, and if it is, then that citizen is making the active choice not to participate.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
