Signatures Due by Friday, April 25, 2025 at 6pm ET

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Senator Jack Reed
1 Exchange Terrace
Providence, RI 02903

Dear Senators Reed and Whitehouse:
We write today as members of the Rhode Island Voting Access Coalition (RIVAC) as well as your individual extended constituents across Rhode Island, to ask you to oppose the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act if it comes before the U.S. Senate. We urge you to use all of the procedural tools available to you to stop the SAVE Act from becoming law and disenfranchising thousands of your constituents. 

The SAVE Act would require documentary proof of citizenship (e.g. a birth certificate, U.S. Passport, or naturalization papers) to register to vote, or update a voter registration, for federal elections. This change would disenfranchise thousands of Rhode Islanders who are otherwise eligible to vote but cannot access the documentation. Estimates are that 21 million Americans do not have access to the documentation that would be required under the SAVE Act.(1) Acquiring the underlying documentation would be both time consuming and expensive. 

The SAVE Act would disproportionately affect women. It would require married women who change their surname to produce marriage documents matching their birth or naturalization documents.(2) It’s estimated that almost 80% of women take their husband’s name when they marry. It would also create additional barriers to voting for transgender people in our state, who face increased difficulty obtaining accurate identity documents. 

The SAVE Act would upend our current systems for voter registration in Rhode Island. The SAVE Act would only allow voters to use their driver’s license to register if it is an “enhanced driver’s license.” At this time Rhode Island does not offer that type of license, rendering our current automatic and online voter registration systems useless. Additionally, it would require the presentation of the proof of citizenship documents “in person,” rendering our current process of voter registration through the mail useless. Ultimately it may lead to the creation of separate voter registration systems for state and federal elections, a burden not only on voters but on election officials.  

Rhode Island has made great strides in modernizing our voter registration system in the last decade, adopting online voter registration and automatic voter registration. Much of that success has come because of the hard work of our organizations to push forward voter registration modernization efforts in Rhode Island. The SAVE Act would be an enormous setback to those efforts.