Riff—What Kansas Taught Me About the SAVE Act
I want to talk about Kansas. Not as a political symbol — just as a data point I can’t get past.
Kansas implemented documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration before it became a federal conversation. They had a real problem to solve: noncitizen voting. So they ran the experiment.
Here’s what the data showed.1 Before the law, noncitizen registration in Kansas was about 0.002% of registered voters. After the law took effect, it blocked roughly 31,000 eligible citizens — 12% of all applicants — from registering to vote.
Thirty-one thousand citizens. To catch a problem that was, by the most generous measure, a few dozen people.
I keep staring at that ratio. What this system does — with mathematical regularity — is create a criterion that sounds universal and reasonable, and then discover, with apparent surprise, that the people most likely to lack the right paperwork are exactly the people already on the margins.
Think of a woman who married, changed her name, and now needs three separate documents to prove she’s herself — birth certificate, marriage certificate, photo ID — all presented in person, all originals or certified copies. She’s one of 69 million American women in that position. And the military ID her veteran neighbor carries? Doesn’t qualify either.
The bill that does this to her has been given a particular name.
Notice what they named it. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. To safeguard. To save. The title performs exactly what the mechanism denies — an ardent concern for every American voter’s access to the franchise. One almost admires the audacity. A law that demonstrably prevents citizens from voting has been named, with a straight face, after the protection of their right to vote.
This is not new. In 1898, Mississippi used a literacy test. The stated goal was an informed electorate — who could argue with that? It just happened that the administration of the test ensured that the wrong voters failed it, and the right voters passed. The criterion was neutral. The results were not.
We know this. We’ve watched this movie before. The names change. The mechanism doesn’t.
Most people supporting this bill genuinely believe in election integrity. I believe in election integrity too.
But when a law demonstrably prevents far more citizens from voting than noncitizens — and Kansas proved this — the question is no longer about election integrity. The question is about which elections, and whose voice, we are protecting.
That’s a harder question. It’s the one that matters.
The House passed this. The Senate will vote.
Kansas already ran the experiment. The results are in.
The figures come from the court record. In Fish v. Schwab, 957 F.3d 1105 (10th Cir. 2020), Kansas officials conceded in litigation that over 99% of the 31,000+ people blocked by their law were U.S. citizens. The 12% figure — one in eight applicants — is from the same proceedings and confirmed by the Associated Press, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Institute for Responsive Government. The 0.002% pre-law noncitizen registration rate comes from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s analysis. These aren’t my numbers. They’re Kansas’s numbers, established under oath.
Kansas appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS declined to hear the case in December 2020, leaving the Tenth Circuit’s ruling intact. JURIST The law hasn’t been enforced since 2018. Florida Politics Every court that reviewed it — district, circuit, and implicitly the Supreme Court — reached the same conclusion. The experiment is over. The results are in the record.