As you may have heard, last week the House of Representatives passed the SAVE Act, S. 128 / H.R. 22 by a narrow vote of 220 to 208.
We are deeply disappointed that the House saw fit to approve this poorly crafted incursion on voter registration as we know it. As we’ve previously outlined, the SAVE Act’s slipshod requirements for documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote would disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters, overwhelm the nation’s thinly-spread election officials, and impose an effective ban on both third-party voter registration and online registration. It now moves to the Senate for consideration.
While the 60 Senate votes needed to surpass the chamber’s current filibuster rules is a high bar, it’s not an insurmountable one. For that reason, we will continue our campaign against the SAVE Act in the Senate to ensure this reckless legislation is never signed into law. Additionally, we will continue to monitor other threats to nonprofit voter engagement, such as President Trump’s likely-unconstitutional Executive Order 14019 with similar attacks on the voter registration process.
Now for the good news
Thanks to the dedicated support and activism and engaged folks like the ones in the Nonprofit VOTE network, we helped generate over 3,500 letters to 419 of the House’s total 435 members. Nearly 1,000 of those messages were generated in the 24 hours before the bill hit the House floor. This was a truly stunning campaign and the entire Nonprofit VOTE team couldn’t be more proud.
And the same passion and momentum we saw in our network was happening across every corner of the democracy space, with organizations of every stripe mobilizing similar advocacy and media efforts to hammer home the danger of the SAVE Act. Though we didn’t stop the bill from passing the House, the efforts of SAVE opponents nonetheless chipped away at its support with two Representatives who had voted for a previous iteration of the SAVE Act in 2024 (Rep. Don Davis NC-1 and Rep. Vicente Gonzales, TX-34) flipping their votes from “YEA” to “NAY”.
We are immensely proud of those nonprofits in our network who stood up to their have their voices heard in this push to preserve the nonpartisan third-party voter engagement at which America’s nonprofits excel. As the SAVE Act fight moves to the Senate, we invite you to be among the first in our network to use our new tool to send a letter to your Senators letting them know that this legislation is bad for voters, bad for election officials, and bad for democracy.
