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A House committee voted to advance a key election security bill that has the support of former President Donald Trump during Thursday’s proceedings, reports said.
Fox News noted that the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, passed the Committee on House Administration in a six-to-one vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also supports the measure.
“Preventing noncitizen voting and foreign influence in our elections is a critical component of restoring trust in our elections. I look forward to seeing these measures come to the floor for consideration soon,” committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a statement.
The legislation would require states to obtain documentary proof of citizenship before allowing people to register to vote in federal elections. It would also mandate that states purge noncitizens from existing voter rolls, Fox noted.
It would also enable citizens to file civil lawsuits against election officials whom they believe are not enforcing or upholding the citizenship requirement.
Fox added: “Johnson first unveiled the bill during a press conference at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, alongside the former president. He reiterated his support for it during another high-level media event at the U.S. Capitol just weeks later. Roy was in attendance along with the bill’s lead in the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, as well as former Trump administration officials Stephen Miller and Hogan Gidley.”
“Due to the wide open border that the Biden administration has refused to close, in fact, that they engineered to open, we now have so many non-citizens in the country that if only one out of 100 of those voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes,” Johnson said then.
The top Democrat on the House Administration panel, Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., argued on Thursday that the bill placed excessive burdens on voters.
“The bill would create extreme documentary requirements nationwide, making it much, much, much harder to vote, burdening every potential voter and particularly affecting people who have difficulty obtaining the required documents, including married women who have changed their names, students on a college campus, the elderly, lower-income people, members of tribal nations, naturalized citizens, and, yes, even Republicans,” Morelle said. “If it were ever to become law, its provisions are so Draconian that it would surely disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans.”
However, conservative groups, including Honest Elections Project Action, have rallied in support of the bill. Jason Snead, the executive director, stated that the bill would “promote election integrity.”
“Requiring proof of citizenship to register and vote is a no-brainer policy for any democracy,” Snead told Fox News Digital. “Americans deserve to know their elections are free of foreign influence.”
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in a major voting case earlier this month that will affect Pennsylvania’s procedures for processing absentee ballots, providing a resounding affirmation of election integrity.
The court rejected an en banc review of a previous ruling, which maintained the validity of the date requirement for absentee voting, by a resounding 9 to 4 vote.
The decision upholds the rejection of absentee ballots submitted after the deadline, which is a significant win for supporters of strict election laws.
In the case, several voter advocacy organizations, including the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Conference of NAACP branches, contested the rejection of absentee ballots that were not properly dated per state law.
The appellants contended that the date requirement was an essential step in preserving the integrity and order of the voting process, and this included the Secretary of the Commonwealth and multiple county boards of elections.
