Lawmakers in the House are expected to vote as early as this month on the SAVE Act, a bill that would require eligible voters to provide documents proving their citizenship in order to register to cast a ballot. Experts and voting rights groups argue that the bill threatens to disenfranchise millions of Americans should it be enacted. But for Indigenous voters, a key voting bloc in 2020, it would stand to weaken their communities’ already suppressed voting power and silence their voices, according to Allie Young, a Diné activist working to expand voter participation in the Navajo Nation.
“With the SAVE Act and how that will discourage engagement by Native people — we’re not going to be electing leaders who will be advocates for our communities,” Young told Salon in a phone interview. “And that’s what is my worry.”
Ostensibly aimed at curbing noncitizen voting — an already illegal act that experts previously told Salon rarely, if ever, happens — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would amend federal law to require proof of citizenship for voter registration. Accepted documentation to prove one’s citizenship under the act would include an ID that fulfills the 2005 REAL ID Act’s requirements, a valid U.S. passport and a valid government-issued ID card from a federal, state or tribal government showing the applicant was born in the U.S. The bill also requires that eligible voters register at their nearest, designated county elections offices.
The bill raises a voting access issue for the some 21.3 million Americans of voting age who lack ready access to citizenship documents and creates a hurdle for the more than 146 million American citizens who, per a Center for American Progress report, don’t have a passport. Those most impacted by the documentation requirement would include Americans in rural and red states, low-income voters and Republicans, who are less likely to have a passport and more likely to take their spouses’ last names than Democrats.
But the disparities in access are especially pronounced for Native voters, who, after years of state-sanctioned voter suppression overturned with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, still face barriers to voting and registering. Many already have to travel long distances to polling places and elections offices, lack adequate citizenship documentation and face language barriers. Still, the demographic, which is bipartisan but has leaned Democratic, played a key role in former President Joe Biden’s 2020 win.
For many Native voters, particularly Indigenous elders and those born at home, citizenship documentation can be hard to come by, Young said. Tribal IDs don’t typically include one’s place of birth, and neither do Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood. Plus, only 43% of adults on Native American lands have a passport, according to the American Communities Project.
“Within my own family, I’m the only person that has a passport — I don’t know anyone else in my family that has a passport,” Young said. “I know that it is something that is rare, and is even seen as a privilege in our communities. So I see that [part of the Act] as posing significant barriers.”
As written, the only currently compliant Native-specific documentation the SAVE Act would accept is an American Indian Card issued by the Department of Homeland Security with the “KIC” classification designating Kickapoo citizens, when presented with a valid government-issued ID.
During a Tuesday CAP Panel on the SAVE Act, Sydney Bryant, CAP’s policy analyst for structural reform and governance, said that the Act’s in-person registration requirement would strip the remote methods that millions of rural voters rely on, forcing them to drive long distances to reach their designated election office — and that issue would disproportionately affect Indigenous voters.
Residents of the Duckwater Reservation in Nevada, for example, would have to drive some four hours — more than 200 miles — to reach the nearest elections office in Nye County, Nevada, she said. CAP researchers also found that in many of these rural areas, a reservation was oftentimes the furthest point away from the nearest, designated elections office.
“The SAVE Act will be putting folks in an untenable situation in order to register to vote,” Bryant said of the time and resources needed to complete such travel.
Greta Bedekovics, associate director of democracy policy at CAP, added that in states like Arizona that attempted to create similar documentation requirements, lawsuits challenging the laws revealed that Native American citizens disproportionately were unable to provide documentary proof of citizenship.
“We know these communities already face some of the largest barriers the ballot box, and both because of their distance and lack of documentation, would also be disproportionately impacted by the SAVE Act,” Bedekovics said at the panel.
In a previous statement to Salon, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, dismissed concerns that the bill would disenfranchise voters as “absurd armchair speculation” spun by the media. He also noted that the bill calls for state election officials to create a process for addressing any discrepancies in an eligible voter’s documentary proof of citizenship that would allow that citizen to provide additional documentation as needed.
“This bill isn’t being attacked because it’ll exclude citizens from voting — it won’t,” Roy said at the time. “It’s being attacked because the policy is wildly popular with the American people, its opponents want and need illegals to vote, and they’ll use anything they can to attack it.”
But for Young, also the founder of Indigenous sovereignty and empowerment organization Protect the Sacred, the bill passing and taking effect would upend her yearslong efforts to expand voting access for and mobilize Native American voters in the Navajo Nation.
Since 2020, the Diné activist has been hosting voter registration events in rural communities of the West-Virginia-sized reservation between Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, bringing access to the right to vote directly to those most often barred from it. Her organization’s Ride to the Polls initiative also encouraged Native voters to make the trek to the Old Primary School — as locals call it — to cast their ballots on Election Day, leading them from Young’s Kayenta, Arizona along a trail to the polling place.
During the 2024 election cycle, she successfully registered some 600 Navajo Nation residents through events built around popular subcultures like horseback co-rides, bullriding and skateboarding. But, should the SAVE Act become law, all that work stops, Young said.
“If we held these events, we would then have to say, ‘Okay, Here’s the information.’ There would be more voter information events where we then tell them, ‘This is the county elections office where you would have to go from here to register to vote,'” she said. With distance as a barrier for members of the community following through on registering themselves, “I definitely would anticipate our voter engagement going down, decreasing by a lot,” she added.
Losing that voting power could also mean their tribal sovereignty would take a hit, Young said. With fewer Native voters participating in elections, the communities have less opportunity to hold elected officials accountable to them and select candidates who will work with and include First Nations in decision-making that will impact their communities.
“The vote is our voice and when we cast that ballot, we’re casting a ballot for our next leaders,” Young said. “If we see those numbers decrease, as far as Native voter turnout and our participation civically, it won’t be good for our communities.”
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