Proposed voting changes raise concerns about access

I am troubled by this administration’s attempt to make voting more difficult under the guise of protecting against voter fraud.

To help me understand what is at stake, I reviewed information from the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group whose mission is to protect and educate about voting rights, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, originally founded by two Republican and two Democratic Senate majority leaders in 2007.

Here is the crux of what I found:

1. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizen voting are rare. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Additionally, many state election offices began using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program in 2025 to verify voter citizenship. Records show that just 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizens.

2. Many eligible citizens do not have access to documentary proof of citizenship. Americans who have changed their name would be required to secure updated documentation to register to vote. Surveys show that eight in 10 married women have changed their surname, meaning they do not possess a birth certificate that matches their current legal name and, therefore, could not present it as valid proof of citizenship. There are an estimated 69 million American women who lack paperwork that reflects their current name.

Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.

1. For voters who register by mail, the SAVE Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to be delivered in person to an election office, limiting the benefits of voting by mail. It also does not clearly specify how documentary proof must be submitted for online registration, leaving election officials without clear guidance on acceptable delivery methods.

2. The SAVE Act requires significant changes to each step of the voter registration process: how voters register, how their identities are verified, and how list maintenance is performed on an ongoing basis. These changes would be costly and time-consuming, taking months, if not years, to achieve.

It is my opinion that the SAVE Act does not protect voters. It will keep many legitimate citizens from voting. How can we know what our citizens want if they are silenced by needless bureaucracy?

Janet Ladrach

Sugarcreek