AUSTIN, Texas—The notorious congressional Republican voter suppression law, the so-called Save Act, is spawning copycat schemes in red states, with Texas and Florida in the lead with measures even more extreme than the national version. And the Texas House plans to vote on its version of the Save Act on April 24. Florida is not far behind.
The threats from the states prompted an emergency call to action during a wide-ranging discussion of the GOP measure on April 22, hosted by the Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of progressive and civil rights groups.
By an almost party-line vote, 220-208, the U.S. House passed its Save Act earlier in April. Four Democrats joined 216 House Republicans in voting for it. Lobbying by foes, organized by the coalition, persuaded two of the Democrats to switch from “yes” to “no.”
But it took a lot of talking. Jay Falk of labor’s Workers Circle—the organization established more than a century ago to aid Jewish refugees fleeing tsarist and Eastern European oppression—said members of her group alone made 489,386 phone calls combined to House members.
Save Act foes calculate the proposed federal law would disenfranchise between 21 million and 70 million people. Most of them would be women whose initial voter registration names do not match the names they have on what would be required identification at the polls, such as drivers’ licenses or passports.
The women wouldn’t know that, though, until they came to vote and were turned away. To avoid that fate, the women would have to go through incredible and expensive gyrations to restore their rights.
Others whom the federal Save Act, sponsored by Trumpite Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, would disenfranchise include military service members, college students, older people of color, people with no official birth certificates and the half of the nation that doesn’t have passports.
The fate of the Save Act is important to workers. Its target is to disenfranchise masses of voters—workers, students, women, people of color among them—who favor worker rights, constitutional freedoms and the right to vote.
Throwing those voters out of the electorate would leave political control in the hands of the corporate class and its puppets on the radical right, including white nationalists.
Additional restrictions in bill
Other restrictions in the federal Save Act would ban all electronic and mail-in voter registration, curb placement of ballot boxes, make an election worker a felon punishable by prison and a huge fine if they register someone who’s ineligible and generally restrict ballot sites.
“The Save Act is based on a shameless lie,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., leading off the long analysis session. As California Secretary of State, he administered elections in the nation’s most-populous state, and he’s been alerting Secretaries of State and other election officials nationwide about the national threat. The federal bill is now pending before the U.S. Senate.
The way to stop the federal Save Act is to flood the phones and e-mails of senators of both parties, said Justin Kwasa of the League of Conservation Voters. “Because the filibuster is still in place,” the U.S. Senate’s 53 ruling Republicans “need seven Democrats to pass it.”
“There are plenty of measures to protect elections integrity,” added Padilla, rebutting Republican charges of widespread voter fraud and illegal voting by undocumented people, which the GOP uses to justify the draconian plan. “It’ll make it harder for Americans to vote,” he said of citizen voting.
But if the federal Save Act is bad, the pending laws in the two big “red” states, Texas and Florida, are worse, session participants learned. The Texas Senate already approved its version of the Save Act and the state’s House was scheduled to vote on it today, April 24. Florida’s version emerged from committees. The state legislature’s session ends on May 2.
“Anyone flagged would have to provide proof of citizenship” right on the spot, explained Amber Mills of Move Texas. That would require a passport or a birth certificate. More than 50% of women lack passports, and women would have to travel hundreds of miles to get birth certificates from their original counties—if those certificates were even available.
“Naturalized citizens are more likely to be flagged,” Mills explained. “Our voter registration [procedure] is already horrible. It’s a completely paper system.”
Naturalized citizens are also less likely to have the needed IDs, Mills said. One corroborating example comes from the U.S. northern border: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows reported many voters in far northern Aroostook County lack birth certificates, because they were born in the nearest hospitals, all located in Canada.
Emily Eby-French of Common Cause Texas said the state’s version of the law would require separate registrations for federal and state elections. “If you can’t prove” you belong on the federal voter rolls, “they’d get you down to voting” just for U.S. lawmakers and local offices, but not for the presidency, she explained.
The reason, she said is that in the presidential balloting, “You’re voting for electors”–the slate of people each political party names to cast its votes in the Electoral College—“not the president.”
“And once you get registered, the counties have to verify you” and your information. “They’re going to be totally swamped.”
“Imagine trying to get those documents 30 days before an election,” Mills said. “Of the (minimum) 21 million people” whom the national Save Act “would disenfranchise, more than one million live in Texas.”
There’s a little more time, through May 2, to lobby Florida’s lawmakers, says Genesis Robinson, executive director of the Equal Education Fund. There’s also an opening, he adds, due to intraparty Republican infighting.
In Texas, the gerrymandered Republican supermajority of lawmakers slavishly follows both the national party and right-wing Gov. Greg Abbott. But the GOP supermajority in Florida “is at war with” term-limited and controversial right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis, Robinson explained.
Still, the Save Act version in Florida is worse than the national bill. For starters, before the 2024 balloting, DeSantis established his own elections police force, to go around, especially to areas with voters of color, and challenge voting rights. Those troopers arrested 12 people, all voters of color, on charges of attempted vote fraud. Judges threw all the cases out.
The Floridian Save Act would not only legalize DeSantis’s cops, but would give them subpoena powers, arrest powers and impose hefty fines on anyone found guilty, Robinson said.
And just to make sure Floridians can’t throw the restrictions out, a separate piece of legislation, HB1205, would revoke state voters’ current rights to petition anything to referendums if they got a million signatures. The Republicans are considering that complete ban after a million voters in 2024 petitioned legalizing the right to abortion to a referendum, and then almost won it. It needed 60% of the vote and got a few percentage points less.
“HB1381,” the Floridian version of the Save Act “would expand surveillance and criminalization” of potential voters, Robinson elaborated. “It would give more power to our elections police. It would crack down on third-party voter registration with more severe penalties” for errors. “Three years ago, the penalty was a maximum $1000 fine. Now it would be $250,000.”
And any registrar who signs up ineligible people could be charged under the state’s version of the federal anti-racketeering law—a law usually used to catch organized crime.
As a result, the League of Women Voters, the nation’s top voter registration organization, is pulling out of Florida.
The Florida Save bill would also bar use of student IDs, public assistance cards and nursing home IDs as means of voter identification and verification. Florida, of course, is a retirement haven with hundreds of nursing homes.
The conclusion, in both the Nation’s Capital and in the states is that “extreme Republicans are trying to pass a radical political agenda” said Kwasa of the League of Conservation Voters. To do so, they need to disenfranchise the opposition. “They’re trying to make it harder for citizens to cast their vote.”
The way to halt disenfranchisement, in either Congress or the states, is “to make sure this bill dies,” said Falk of Worker’s Circle.
Further information on how to do that is available in a toolkit from the Brennan Center for Law and Justice.
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