Is the SAVE Act Necessary?

Well, thank you, Henry, and thank you, Stephen.

And so my belief is that the SAVE Act, the Act of Verifying Citizenship, is necessary for election integrity.

And I think the approach, if we step back for a minute, the big answer to the question why is, It's because the American people demand it.

They really, in many ways, want to have confidence in our election system.

It's absolutely necessary for our republic that citizens have a sort of a trust that their voting system is working and verifying registrants to vote and that their ballot is counted.

And when non-citizens, which there's general agreement, And there's actually a federal law that says that citizens should not vote, shall not vote in elections, that that is actually taking place and that that is something that their government is verifying and confirming that non-citizens aren't voting.

And so we could argue about the scope of the problem, but there is a problem.

And so I think the big answer to the question why is that it's because the American people need it and demand it.

But if we step back and we talk about it as conservatives, And I always heard the argument that, look, federal law, we don't want election integrity laws, even at the federal level, preempting state law.

But what we have really here is we have the National Voter Registration Act, which is already preempting a lot of voter registration and it's preempting list maintenance.

And so this is something that adding this section to the National Voter Registration Act would basically provide some uniformity to states.

I think that's important.

It also provides a cause, a reason why we are doing this.

The NVRA was passed because the Congress believed that there was an increased need for access and some integrity.

And so they passed this law over 30 years ago.

But in many ways, it's not working.

It certainly doesn't work when it comes to citizenship.

It's really caused more problems, including in Arizona and the states, about how states are to verify citizenship.

You have different courts and different circuits that are involved now in sort of trying to micromanage what state A can do and what state Z can do.

I mean, so the Congress really needs to step in and say, look, this is the one uniform way we're going to confirm and verify citizenship for the purpose of voting in the states.

And so that is obviously something that we learned from Florida back in 2000, is that the lack of uniformity and sort of even small margins of errors, what I mean by that is if there's errors in our elections, that those can have you know, impactful events on our nation.

Voter confidence can dip to a point where Congress does require some sort of minimal standards and minimal accuracy standards.

So in this case, I'm hopeful that there's not a crater event.

I don't want to have a meltdown in elections where a very close presidential race is decided by 300 votes and we find out that 100 of them are non-citizens.

That should never have been on the rolls to begin with.