Those who closely follow American politics have long since become inured to Democrat bluster, but occasionally one of the left’s “leaders” says something so absurd that it raises eyebrows even among the most cynical observers. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accomplished this feat recently when he took to X and brayed, “The SAVE Act is nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0. It would disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
The last time we heard that idiotic charge was in January of 2022, when former President Joe Biden denounced Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 as a sinister plot to suppress minority turnout because it strengthened Voter ID requirements. As the Daily Signal reported at the time, the 2022 midterms broke previous turnout records and black voters said the new rules made it easier to cast ballots. Schumer failed to get the memo.
The SAVE Act was passed by the House in April 2025. It would amend the National Voter Registration Act by requiring states to obtain documentary proof of citizenship that complies with the REAL ID Act of 2021 before registering a person to vote in a federal election. This is why Schumer declared that the bill would be DOA in the Senate. He knows that requiring proof of citizenship would cost his party a crucial constituency. Here he is in more depth on the bill:
“If you’re one of the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who does not have access to your birth certificate, or if you’re one of the 50 percent of Americans who don’t have a passport, the SAVE Act could make it impossible for you to participate in elections. It would lead to massive purges that inevitably remove legitimate citizens, who have the right to vote, from voter rolls… the SAVE Act is dead on arrival in the Senate.”
It is not, of course, legitimate citizens that Schumer is really concerned about. The “citizens” Schumer wants to protect from being “purged” are illegal aliens who are unlawfully able to vote via automatic voter registration (AVR) while interacting with state agencies. AVR didn’t exist in the U.S. until 2015, when Oregon became the first state to automatically register voters using information from its Division of Motor Vehicles.
A decade later, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) reports that AVR has rapidly metastasized. All of the states that have implemented AVR insist they are models of election integrity, but the objective data suggest otherwise. Oregon has been at this longer than any other state, yet its system was still registering non-citizens to vote as recently as 2024. And the NCSL reports that Oregon is by no means unique:
“Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. These states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington—issue a license if an applicant provides certain documentation.”
It will immediately be obvious that all but one of these states are controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, it is no coincidence that this list largely overlaps with the states that have refused to comply with DOJ requests for voter roll data pursuant to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). As reported by AMAC Newsline last year, the DOJ had sued 14 states. The total is now 20.
According to the far-left Brennan Center for Justice, the DOJ is filing these lawsuits as part of a dark conspiracy to interfere with elections: “Make no mistake about what these actions represent: an attempt to take over election administration, a role that the Constitution grants to states, not the federal government.” This, and alleged voter privacy concerns, is the pretext these states are relying upon to hide the contents of their voter rolls.
Unfortunately for these noncompliant states, the claim about the DOJ’s motives can easily be debunked by perusing NVRA and HAVA. As to the Constitution, the Elections Clause gives the last word to Congress: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
The reason Sen. Schumer and the rest of the Democrats are so terrified of the SAVE Act and allowing the DOJ to see the voter rolls could not be more obvious. They know the voter rolls of states named above list millions of illegal aliens—a large percentage of whom have no idea that they are registered to vote. Moreover, most of these states automatically send ballots to every voter on their rolls, incentivizing illegal ballot harvesting.
Passage of the SAVE Act, and aggressive enforcement of its provisions, would constitute an existential threat to the Democrats. As reported in City Journal, “Recent migration numbers emphasize how population gains, economic growth, and political power are shifting toward Republican strongholds.” If the Democrats can’t count the votes of illegal aliens, they have no way to offset the loss of legitimate voters who have left the party.
And the GOP seems determined to get it done. Florida Sen. Rick Scott insists that “Senator Thune is committed to finding a way to pass the SAVE Act. Like its sponsor, Senator Mike Lee, Senator Scott has been instrumental in whipping votes for the SAVE Act.” Moronic slogans like “Jim Crow 2.0” won’t be enough to stop the bill’s momentum.
(Editor’s note: AMAC Action supported the SAVE Act’s passage through the U.S. House and has urged the Senate to take up the legislation.)
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
