John Fortier analyzes the Senate's struggle with the Save America Act, which seeks citizenship proof for voter registration but faces a likely filibuster due to lacking the 60-vote margin. While Republicans push the bill and Democrats argue strict documentation burdens voters without easy access to IDs, Fortier estimates non-citizen voting remains rare yet highlights data from the Real ID Act as a potential solution. The discussion further critiques widespread mail-in voting for causing uncorrectable errors and privacy risks, advocating instead for early voting centers, ultimately revealing how deep partisan divides over election integrity persist despite varying state laws. [Automatically generated summary]
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This is John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute.
He's their senior fellow and along to talk about efforts in the Senate to change federal election laws or add to them.
Mr. Fortier, good morning.
Thanks for having me.
The Save America Act, the concentration of the Senate this week.
What's important to know about the Senate's focus?
Well, this is an act that deals with the proof of citizenship to register to vote.
We do not have a national law that requires documentation at this point.
We do have a national law that says you must be a citizen to vote.
Republicans are for this.
It's passed the House and we're now before the Senate.
The Senate typically has a 60-vote margin to break a filibuster.
And in this case, it's very likely that Democrats will not go along with this bill and there will not be those 60 votes.
There has been talk on the Republican side that senators should stand up and maybe break the filibuster in this case, take away as they have done in some other areas.
It doesn't look like it's going to happen.
But the argument is really over whether it's a good idea to require sets of documentation to prove you're a citizen to register.
Whereas today we have sort of a mishmash of state laws, some of them requiring it, others asking you to verify or to swear that you're a citizen but not require proof.
But as far as the changes that the Republicans are asking for, what case would you make for or against why these changes are needed?
Well, I think there are some arguments for it, which are that we have a country now that has more people who are not citizens, not legal citizens, or also illegal citizens.
Neither can register to vote.
But we don't have a perfect system for proving that.
I think Republicans would say we do ask in the Real ID Act.
Many Americans will know that they've had to upgrade their licenses.
We did ask for proof of citizenship, whether you are or not.
You can still get it as a legal citizen.
But there's a lot of information out there that's been provided, but none of that has really gone into the voting system.
And so this is asking for that.
Democrats say, look, there are too many burdens being put on the voting system.
It's going to make some people not be able to find their birth certificates or their passports or other forms of documentation that would prove this and maybe will keep people from actually getting registered and then ultimately voting.
When you hear that argument from Democrats about the inconvenience for some, what do you make of it?
Well, I do think that there are surveys that they point to that say a certain number of Americans, 7, 8, 10% of people, have difficulty of getting these documents.
I think if you look a little more at the surveys, many people have those documents, but they're worried they don't have easy access to them.
It's hard to get your birth certificate.
As I mentioned earlier, one thing I think I wish we had done in a better way is that the states have all had to go through this real ID process where you've upgraded your license and many people have shown proof of citizenship to get their license.
And most states didn't really take that information and transmit it to the voting system.
And so the voting lists, we have less proof of documentation.
So it's really an argument about how much it's going to inconvenience voters, but on the other hand, can we really get the proof for citizenship, which we don't really have in a widespread way.
Do you think that there is enough of those who vote in elections that are not supposed to vote to sway elections?
Or is this a small amount of actions like that happening?
And if that's the case, why make these widespread changes?
Well, we don't know exactly how many people are registered to vote who are non-citizens and how many vote, but we have good estimates that it's a relatively small number, that you might get on a voter registration list either you sneak on or perhaps you get on inadvertently because there are some processes in states that put people on voter lists which they might not even know that they're on.
And so there is a case that more people are not citizens and we should do a better job of getting that.
I do think that the question of how we do it, and as I mentioned, I wish we had used the massive move we've made in the last 10 years to getting people real IDs, which they need to get on airplanes and other things in a way that gets to the voting system.
So people do have some of that information.
But again, it's a question of how quickly we implement it and what the details are as to how it works.
The legislation is being debated in the Senate, the Save America Act.
And if you have questions about it and how it works and what it would do if it were to pass, 202748-8000 for Democrats is where you can call and ask your questions for Republicans.
202748-8001.
And Independents, 202748-8002.
Text us two at 202-748-8003.
You've talked about a couple of things.
The act, if it were to pass, requires individuals to present eligible photo identification before voting.
It requires states to obtain proof of citizenship in person when registering an individual to vote, requires states to remove non-citizens from those existing voter rolls.
There is also an amendment being debated that if it were to pass, it would also change mail in voting.
What do you think about that add-on to what's currently in this legislation?
Well, as I said, there are several bills around, and that's not what the Senate is considering today.
But they want to add it through amendment.
So the President has said that he is not such a big fan of voting by mail.
And we have seen a big increase in voting by mail over the last 25, 30 years.
Over 30% of the country votes by mail, but it's very episodic.
In some states, we do a lot of it in the West, and some states we don't do as much.
I personally have been always a bit of a critic of widespread voting by mail.
I'd prefer to see voting early at voting early centers as well as Election Day.
And for those who need it, vote by mail.
But that's been a state-by-state matter at this point.
And the question is, do we want to do this on a national level?
Again, I think there's some divide in this between the parties.
And we saw, especially during COVID, that the divide got very wide when the parties had very different ideas about whether it was a good thing or not to even go out and go to the polling place and whether you needed absentee ballots.
It's calmed down a little bit, but there's still a partisan divide.
As I say, if I were in a state, I think I'd prefer a system that provided a lot of early voting, provided Election Day voting, and mail voting for those Who absolutely needed it, but there are some states that think that's the system that they want, that they essentially are 100% voting.
And so there's a divide in the country.
What's the chief criticism of mail-in voting to you?
Well, I think there are some questions about how well it works in some ways, that there are potential problems of voters making mistakes on ballots that are not correctable.
There are some questions about some of the states' policies as to how long they take to count if they don't require them to be in by election day.
Some of the counts take a very long time.
I think there are some around the edges, privacy questions.
If people have absentee ballots, maybe someone else can see it.
We had a long history in our country where we had some corruption and we put in the privacy of the voting booth.
That was a big reform that we did in the 19th century to really improve our voting.
We take you live now to a press conference with Senate Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates speaking in opposition to the Republicans' voter ID legislation.
This is live coverage on C-Space.
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Instead of dealing with the graphing, grappling with the extreme problems and crises facing our nation today, some lawmakers in Washington are pushing a bill that would make.