In the debate covering the SAVE Act over whether Voter ID should be required in all states, my students and I looked at whether there is a partisan advantage in the proposed rules for voter identification.
We looked at Election Day voting requirements, and how the states voted in the 2024 contest at the ballot box.
Earlier this week, LaGrange College undergraduates Katie Anderson, Ryan Avin, Dylan Bailey, Akajah Burton, Madison Chauvin, Katherine Cunningham, Roniya Elliott, Trey Galbraith, Connor Gilkey, Todd Glover, Andrew Hiers, Jalen Jones, Ethan Longshore, Emma McCoy, Tanner Morneau, Carmello Morris, Noah Patterson, Jenna Pittman, Daniel Powers, Leah Rosenthal, Jayden Shivers, Morgan Sims, Joaquin Stewart Lopez, Steven Tarvin and Palmer Walker researched World Population Review to see which states require photo ID when voting, as well as which ones necessitate identification other than one with a photo.
Finally these students looked Donald Trump’s share of the vote in the 2024 Election, as reported by CNN. (https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president?election-data-id=2024-PG&election-painting-mode=projection-with-lead&filter-key-races=false&filter-flipped=false&filter-remaining=false).
We found that of the 25 states that had the strictest photo ID requirements, their average GOP vote in 2024 was 58.04%. For the eight states that were moderately strict, their vote percentage for Trump was 51.31%. For the 17 states that had the least stringent requirements for voter identification averaged a GOP vote of 41.58% in 2024.
Separately from the students, I looked at the likelihood of those illegally in America possibly voting. I used evidence from both the conservative Heritage Foundation, the Trump Administration, two red states, and the voting rights group the Brennan Center to evaluate this.
The American Immigration Council reveals “A close review of the cases in Heritage’s database reveal that the organization has documented just 68 total cases of noncitizen voting going back to the earliest cases documented in the 1980s. That’s less than 5% of the cases in their database, total. The remaining cases all involve U.S. citizens.” Even if we count all U.S. citizen fraud in elections from the Reagan years to the present, that’s roughly 1,500 cases in 40+ years of voting.
As the Brennan Center reports “All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes — like Louisiana and Utah did recently — have repeatedly confirmed that fact.”
Yet there are fears that legitimate U.S. citizens could be disenfranchised on Election Day.
SAVE Act provisions also target those election workers who would be required to register voters at the polls, according to the Brennan Center.
“The new SAVE Act proposals would inject chaos into election administration. They would place a massive unfunded burden on state and local election officials. And they would expose those officials to significant legal risk. The bills would leave it up to local officials to decide whether a voter who lacks one of the specified documents has done enough to prove citizenship. Officials who make an honest mistake could face civil and criminal penalties. An election official could even be punished for registering an eligible American citizen, just for failing to collect all the right paperwork at the right time.”
In my opinion, criminal penalties should be given to those who deliberately block a U.S. citizen from exercising his or her right to vote on Election Day.
Blocking non-citizens from voting is fine, but stopping legitimate U.S. citizens from voting goes against what America stands for.