Every so often, like clockwork, Washington drops whatever minor duty it was pretending to attend to and descends into a fiery, end-of-days brawl over election mechanics. The latest battleground is a piece of legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
If you peel away the congressional grandstanding, the SAVE Act is conceptually pretty simple. At its core, it demands that anyone registering to vote in a federal election provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship—think a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers—rather than merely signing a form under penalty of perjury. It also instructs states to establish processes to cross-check voter rolls against federal databases and remove any non-citizens who might have slipped through the cracks.
If you ask me, requiring someone to show proof of citizenship to vote in a nation’s federal election sounds eminently reasonable. I need a valid photo ID to board a domestic flight, rent a car, and see a doctor. It is hard to get deeply offended by the notion that choosing the leader of the “free” world should require at least as much identification.
To see this clearly, let’s temporarily set aside the obsessive rhetoric of President Trump, the aggressive, anti-immigrant posture that often characterizes his administration, the fabricated Jim Crow parallels drawn by the opposition, and the concerns about the separation of powers between the federal government and the states. Strip away the political posturing and partisan grievances, and the basic mechanic itself—verifying that voters meet the legal eligibility requirements before handing them a ballot—is hardly a radical idea.
So why does a proposal like the SAVE Act cause such an explosive, catastrophic meltdown on Capitol Hill? Why does every debate over voter ID, mail-in ballots, or voter roll maintenance devolve into a high-stakes, existential knife fight where each side accuses the other of destroying the republic?
The answer, as I argued in a previous article How About Making Elections Less Important?, is that we are missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn’t really the administrative paperwork of registering to vote. The real problem is that political initiatives like the SAVE Act shouldn’t even need to be a national obsession in the first place.
We are trapped in permanent, exhausting campaign cycles because our government has expanded into virtually every corner of our daily lives. Come election day, we, the people, feel the urgency to get to the ballot box because we know that whoever wins will hold immense power over our paychecks, our healthcare, our retirement, and our children’s education. If we don’t vote—or if the opposing party games the system—we risk getting steamrolled by political factionalism and armies of special interest groups fighting over the tax, spending, and regulatory bounty.
In a truly free society—a system of genuine capitalism where government is strictly limited to protecting individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—the right to vote would be a marginal issue. Why? Because we simply wouldn’t have that much to vote on.
Consider retirement. Millions of citizens march to the polls every other November driven by the anxious dread that the wrong party will cut, freeze, or alter their Social Security checks. But in a free society, government wouldn’t be running a bloated, close to bankrupt, federal pension system. You would be in complete charge of your own retirement from the day you entered the workforce. You wouldn’t pay the hefty 12.4% payroll tax (split between you and your employer), leaving you with a significantly higher paycheck to invest. Combined with zero capital gains taxes on your investments, another feature of a free society, the simple power of compound interest would make it nearly impossible not to retire comfortably. Without politicians holding the keys to your golden years, your retirement wouldn’t hinge on who wins a Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Voting on the matter would be entirely moot.
Or look at education. Parents currently wage ferocious political battles over local school boards, state curricula, and federal education departments just to ensure their kids get a decent schooling. In a truly free market, education wouldn’t be controlled by government bureaucracies. It would operate like any other service: competing free-market providers would drive costs down and quality up. We would see the educational equivalent of a “Walmart of schooling” and the online efficiency of an “Amazon of learning,” offering affordable, high-quality options tailored to every child, every value, and every wallet. Parents wouldn’t need to exercise political power at the ballot box to rescue their kids from failing district schools.
When government is strictly limited to its proper functions—national defense, the police, and the courts—the political stakes drop through the floor. Washington loses the power to hand out regulatory favors, grant industry subsidies, or redistribute wealth. Corrupt lobbying loses its return on investment, and the white-hot intensity of our national political theater instantly cools off.
Which brings us back to the SAVE Act. While I have no objection to asking voters to prove their citizenship before casting a federal ballot, my bigger hope isn’t primarily for tighter voter registration rolls. My hope is for a society where elections matter so little to our personal survival and prosperity that we stop treating every election cycle like Armageddon.
If we reduced government back to its constitutional guardrails, who occupies the White House or controls Congress wouldn’t drastically alter your wallet, your family’s future, or your personal freedom. Whether non-citizens vote, whether voters show a passport or a driver’s license, or how often voter rolls are scrubbed would become what it always should have been: a minor, low-stakes administrative detail rather than a national crisis.
Until we make elections less important, we will keep fighting over who gets to hold the whip. But if we can take away the whip itself, initiatives like the SAVE Act will just be plain old common sense.
The bipartisan fascists are making citizenship, with bestowed privileges, a title of nobility which was prohibited by the defunct Constitution. The SAVE Act is an act bestowing titles of nobility with conditions of servitude.