SAVE Act revives bad practices of the past

There’s a basic promise in American democracy: the right to vote is free. Not free in the sense of trivial, but free in the sense that no citizen should have to buy their way into the ballot box. That’s why the 24th Amendment banned poll taxes more than 60 years ago.

The proposed SAVE Act risks bringing them back in a modern form.

The Act would require every new voter to present documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, a certified birth certificate or a naturalization certificate. For millions of eligible citizens, those documents are missing, lost or never issued in the first place. Replacing them costs money. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But the principle is the same: a citizen must pay a fee to access a constitutional right.

That is a financial barrier to voting, no matter what name we give it.

The burden would fall hardest on low‑income voters, rural voters, Native American communities, elderly citizens and anyone whose records were lost to time, disaster or bureaucracy. These are not hypothetical cases. They are our neighbors.

Election integrity matters. But so does constitutional integrity. We can secure our elections without forcing citizens to purchase documents the government already created using their tax dollars.

The right to vote should never depend on the size of a person’s wallet or the luck of their paperwork. We’ve been down that road before, and the Constitution tells us not to walk it again.

Rich Garling

Grayslake