TRANSCRIPT: Leader Schumer & Legal Experts On The Dangers Of The SAVE America Act Ahead Of Upcoming Senate Vote

Washington, D.C. - Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and top election law experts held a press call to highlight the dangers of the SAVE America Act, citing how it would disenfranchise millions of Americans. Below are Senator Schumer's remarks:

Nothing is more important than defeating this dagger to the heart of our democracy. It's one of the most despicable pieces of legislation I've come across in the many years I've been a legislator.

Americans are watching in horror as Donald Trump leads us into a war without a conclusion, without goals, and without even any kind of coherency. And the latest job numbers show our economy is even weaker than people thought. Costs are going up. And what are the MAGA Republicans doing in the Senate?

Well, they're helping Donald Trump disenfranchise millions of Americans and undermine democracy by pushing this despicable SAVE Act. Guess what? Donald Trump believes he's going to lose the election. He knows his numbers are in the gutter. And so, what does he want to do? Well, he wants to cheat. He wants to steal the election like he did in 2021 in a different way.

What Republicans should be doing is changing their policies because they're so unpopular with the American people. Instead, they want to rig our democracy and make it much harder for people to vote. And that is what the SAVE Act is all about.

It just boils my blood. It is such a gross piece of legislation. Donald Trump actually said it himself. He said, "if Republicans pass the SAVE Act, it'll guarantee the midterms." That's how an autocrat talks. That's how an autocratic thug talks.

Trump wants to undermine democracy and prevent people from voting in a democracy.

Now, the Republicans are trying to hide what it is by saying what it's not. They talk a lot about voter ID, but the SAVE Act is not, not, not a voter ID bill. And I hope all the members of the press on this will make that clear. It is rather a voter suppression bill.

Republicans won't tell you that under their bill all states would be required to hand over their voter records to be screened by a DHS, Department of Homeland Security, that same notorious department rebuilt by the Elon Musk DOGE squad. That system that Musk put in is not about cleaning voter rolls. It's about choosing who gets to vote. And they will purge tens of millions of people from the voter rolls. Once purged, you don't even know it. They have no obligation to tell you. So, you can show up at the polls on election day, same place you've been showing up for 20 years, and they'll say, "Sorry Ms. Jones, sorry Mr. Smith, you're no longer on the voter rolls. You've been purged." There's nothing you can do the day of the election.

And what happens if you find out ahead of time that you've been purged? Well, they won't tell you. They would terminate, under this bill, the most common ways Americans register to vote. No longer would a driver's license or a state provided ID, you now would need something like a passport, which less than 50 percent of Americans have, or a birth certificate, and a lot of Americans can't easily access that. If you get married and change your maiden name, you too could get boosted off the roll, so it's anti-women.

The SAVE Act, in other words, would make it easier to purchase an AR-15 than to cast a ballot. Easier to register to purchase an AR-15 than register to cast a vote.

Republicans also won't tell you that the bill would terminate the most common ways Americans register to vote. No more mail-in registration, no more voter registration in church, on campus, in your community, no more registration when you get a driver's license or sign up for Social Security. Their method is so, so remote that only six percent of Americans register to vote in person in an election office.

But that's the only option in the SAVE Act. So, when we say that tens of millions would be disenfranchised, it's not an exaggeration.

And now he's going even further, Trump. If he doesn't want to vote by mail, tell that to disabled Americans.

Bluntly, the SAVE America Act makes it harder to vote and much easier to steal an election. And Trump is learning day by day that the only way he's going to win is stealing it, and we are not going to let him win. We are going to do everything we can to block this pernicious, despicable, anti-American piece of legislation.

Now, why is Donald Trump so obsessed with the SAVE Act that he's telling Republicans he's not going to vote for anything other than the SAVE Act? Well, he's told Republicans in Congress that unless they pass the SAVE Act, he won't sign any piece of legislation. That shows you how maniacal he's become, because he knows without rigging the game he is in trouble. His Republican congressmen and senators are in trouble.

But as I mentioned, instead of changing policies, instead of trying to persuade Americans with his ideas, he wants to take away people's right to vote, something that has been done time and time again in dictatorships and autocracies. It's cynical and it's un-American. But that's what Trump is. He's an autocratic thug, a bully. He doesn't know how to persuade people. Rather, he likes to threaten and coerce them, and that's what he's trying to do to this democracy.

I will tell you this, everyone on this call. Democrats will not let Donald Trump ram this bill through the Senate. Not this week, not ever. And Democrats are going to make sure the American people have their chance to deliver their verdict at the elections this fall.

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Reporter: It seems like there are multiple versions of this bill floating around. Do we know exactly what Republicans are going to bring to the floor and specifically on the mail-in ballot? What provisions are causing the most alarm-submitting applications for mail-in ballots or providing voter ID for mail-in ballots? Can you talk more about that issue?

Leader Schumer: Well, I'll answer the first part. We don't yet know what Thune is doing, what he will do exactly, but we're prepared for every possible scenario. My caucus really feels strongly that this would be a horror, you know, one of the worst things that's happened in the history of this country in terms of allowing people to vote. And so we're prepared for every possibility. But he hasn't said what he would do. Who wants to take the one on the mail-in ballot? I would answer yes. One provision's worse than the next. Imagine what Eisen just said. You can sue-a private citizen can sue anybody at the polling place. These people are volunteers. They're dedicated. Any one of us who votes knows how dedicated they are. They show up on election day and they're so proud they're serving democracy, and they're making them subject to any kind of frivolous lawsuit. The average person can't defend against that.

Marc Elias: I can take a shot at the mail-in voting because I think I mentioned it. So if you look at section three of the bill, which is in the SAVE America Act, which I think is the base bill, at least that is before the Senate as I understand it. This is what Republicans keep talking about: "Oh, it's just voter ID and everybody loves voter ID." What it says is under section B2, in the case of individual voting by absentee, the individual shall include a copy of the eligible photo identification document, A, with respect to request for an absentee ballot, and B, with submission of an absentee ballot.

So, let's just start with the obvious. There is very little work that is being done by making people-by the way, when I say "work," it's a lot of work for the voters-but there's very little good that is being accomplished by having someone have to photocopy their ID and send it in. Because number one, the Republicans won't accept a copy of a photo ID for in-person voting, so very quickly they won't accept it for mail either. But, more importantly setting that aside, someone who photocopies their ID where are they exactly supposed to put it: in the request for a mail-in ballot, or more importantly, with the ballot itself?

For those of you who have followed the more than a dozen lawsuits that I've been involved in-probably two dozen lawsuits just in the state of Pennsylvania, just one state - over the composition of where various things go in which envelopes, and whether they are sealed or not sealed, you can see what Republicans are laying out here: which is that states don't have an envelope for a copy of your driver's license. They don't have an envelope for a copy of your passport. And if people put that in the inner envelope with the ballot, as sure as I'm on this call, the Republicans are going to say that invalidates the ballot. I mean, we know that because they're already saying that things in the inner envelope or not in the envelope should invalidate ballots. If it goes in the outer envelope, then they're going to say, well, but it wasn't secret, right, because it wasn't in a secrecy envelope.

So presumably what they have in mind is, I guess, a third envelope, which will be just for the photocopy of the ID. But if, God forbid, a person puts the ballot in the wrong envelope or the ID in the wrong envelope, then ballots are going to be discarded. So this is just an end run. This was an end run in the interim to ban mail-in voting or to basically make mail-in voting logistically impossible before Donald Trump just came out in the State of the Union and said, let's just ban mail-in voting, which has at least going for it honesty. Whereas this provision, which is masquerading as photo ID, is really just a ban on mail-in voting. I'd also point out that there is no reason why you should have to provide a copy of your, a photocopy of your ID to request a mail-in ballot if you're having to require to return the mail-in ballot. So, they're actually doubling up for mail-in voting the requirement that you provide this photocopy, again, as a way of just making it very, very hard to get an absentee ballot and to get it back.

And finally, I would add the question of postage, right? The fact is that right now, the postage for a mail-in ballot, people, you know, can know what that is. If you now add more documentation, it's going to change the postage. And so, you're going to have a whole bunch of mail-in ballots that are just rejected because they don't have the proper postage because now you've added additional documents as people include a photocopy of one ID and a photocopy of another ID and a photocopy of a third ID. You can see the problem. So, everyone just needs to be clear-eyed. This photo ID requirement is not actually about ID. It's about banning mail-in voting, which is why, as far as I know, and I've litigated in every state, I'm not aware of any state that currently requires what this would require. And I'm not aware of any state that is currently able to do the thing that this seeks to do with a zero-day implementation, because it's not deferred for implementation for 2028. Like tomorrow, if it's passed tomorrow, the day after states would need to implement this.

Janai Nelson: I wanted to add something very, very quickly. And that is simply to say that one thing that goes, cuts across all of this is there's this presumption for the public that there is no voter eligibility verification process. It suggests, you know, the advancement of these bills suggest that somehow there's no other way to verify whether voters are eligible when states, every single state in this country has the ability and has been verifying voters since we've been accepting mail-in ballot requests, since we've been registering voters. There is no new problem to solve here. And all voter applications for absentee ballots, all voter registration applications are verified by double checking against a state registry and database. So it's just very important to underscore that there is an apparatus already to ensure that elections are safe and secure and that only eligible voters are casting ballots in our elections.

Reporter: There are a wide variety of election principles that many Americans agree on. That includes early voting. That includes, in many ways, bipartisan, allowing some felons to return to being able to vote. But one of those is voter ID on election day, a photo ID. Is there any form of a photo ID? Understanding what Janai has said about the address verification issue, is there any form in theory that you all would be open to discussing?

Nelson: I'm happy to take a stab at that. There already are ways to verify voters. This is something as simple as the signature verification that we use in New York State to some states that do require other forms of voter ID, including utility bills or other proof of address, driver's licenses, real IDs, which are becoming increasingly popular, but are not yet possessed by as many people as would be necessary not to have a negative impact on the electorate. But there are so many ways to verify voters through other forms of ID that have worked successfully. And I think it's really important to underscore the point that there hasn't been any instances of in-person voter fraud that are of any consequence in our elections. And there have been studies for decades and millions of ballots and voters that have confirmed that this is not actually a problem. So there are many, many possibilities for a voter ID and they range from everything I just mentioned. But there's no one ID that that I think is being advanced at this point that is universally possessed by enough Americans to make that a mandatory requirement in each state.

Norm Eisen: And if I can just jump in, it's Norm. Hi, Lisa. That's what's so pernicious about this bill. This is not a voter ID bill. It's a voter suppression bill. The different states, that's the beauty of our American experiment. And it's enshrined in the Constitution. The states are doing this. And it's proven there's no voter ID problem. It's proven by this vanishing frequency. Heritage looked state by state for decades, over 25 years. For example, in Arizona, 0.00008 percentage, just a couple dozen cases of fraud that were demonstrated. There's no need for this bill. It would hugely burden voters, election officials, and everybody else. It is not a voter ID bill, and there is no voter ID problem, Lisa.

Schumer: I was just going to add one thing, and that is that Democrats support voter ID. In fact, we included it and it is included in our Freedom to Vote legislation several years ago. So, we're not opposed, you know they had Democrats are opposed to this we're not. This is not a voter ID bill. This is not a bill that says you shouldn't identify yourself or you must identify yourself when you show up to vote. This is about purging the voter rolls in a massive way, so you never even get the chance to show a voter ID when you showed up to vote because you'd be knocked off the rolls.

Reporter: Hey, thanks for doing this. I know there's a lot of focus on the voter provisions in this bill, which are at the heart of it, but I wanted to bring up the president's insistence, insistence that he will not accept a version of this bill without two provisions targeting transgender individuals. I'm curious if what you, Leader Schumer, make of his insistence on that and whether Democrats will stand unified against those particular provisions.

Schumer: Look, I'm not going to speculate on what they'll put in and not put in. Thune hasn't told us what he's going to do. I can tell you this. We have table topped every single thing they might do, and we're prepared to meet each one and defeat this bill.

Reporter: I wanted to ask about Trump suggesting that Republicans attach the SAVE Act to FISA reauthorization? And separately, if I can, when you were in the majority, Leader Schumer, Democrats pushed for reforms to the filibuster, you know, when Republicans blocked your priorities, like the For the People Act. Do you think the filibuster still needs reforms? And does that include the talking filibuster?

Schumer:, I'm not going to speculate on what they're going to put in the bill, not put in the bill, what kind of filibuster they might do, they might not do. I would say this, that the significant difference between the vote back in, I guess it was 2020, I don't remember the exact year, several years ago, and this one is, we were trying to expand rights. They're trying to contract rights. That's a world of difference.

Reporter: Hey, Senator, I know you said that you don't have clarity yet from the Republicans about how they're going to go about this floor process here over the next few days. But is there anything you can say even generally about what Democrats' strategy will be on the floor when it comes to things like amendments, for example, as well? Thank you.

Schumer: Well, again, you know, thank you. But we don't know what Thune's going to do yet, but we have prepared for every eventuality. And that includes, you know, if they do amendments. But right now, we just can't speculate because we don't know what they're going to do. I don't know if they know what they're going to do.

Reporter: I know Leader Thune has said repeatedly that Republicans don't have the votes to go to a talking filibuster on this or otherwise to change the filibuster to pass this bill. How confident are you that Republicans who oppose changing the filibuster are going to stand strong on this as the process plays out this week under possible additional pressure from the president?

Schumer: Yeah, I'm not going to, again, it doesn't make sense for me to speculate until we know what they're going to do. As I said, we've mapped out all of these scenarios and red gamed them and all of that. But because we take this so seriously and that's why we're doing that. But you've seen how hard it is. Here you have Trump's bellowing that he needs this and you've gotten a lot of resistance from the Republican caucus one way or another. So you have to ask them why they're resisting.

Reporter: When you were in the majority, you've been involved in these discussions several times. Did you study the talking filibuster and whether it is a viable way to pass legislation with a simple majority?

Schumer: Look, every different thing came up one way or another. Jeff Merkley's been talking about these things. Lots of other members have talked about it, we're familiar with all the possible scenarios.

Reporter: So it sounds like you believe that the bill this week will, in fact, fail. But I believe someone mentioned earlier you anticipate additional challenges coming down the pike for the rest of the year. So could you speak to a little bit about what you anticipate, should this bill fail this week, what you're still going to be up against when it comes to other ways that they try and pass provisions of this bill?

Schumer: Well, let me put it this way, Jackie. This bill is, you know, has a huge stench to it today, and that stench ain't going away, nor is our desire to fight it. And every, all of the pernicious provisions in the bill, you've heard it outlined. I mean, it's just appalling what they're trying to do here. And it has my caucus really, really motivated to do everything we can to stop it. It's just, it's a cynical attempt by Donald Trump to steal the election. He tried it back in 2021. It didn't work that way. This is a different approach, but with the kind of result that would be equally as devastating to a fair election.

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