Schumer says SAVE America Act among ‘most despicable’ bills he’s ever seen

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) is calling the SAVE America Act, the voting reform legislation that Senate Republicans will bring to the floor this week, “one of the most despicable pieces of legislation I’ve come across in the many years I’ve been a legislator.”

“Nothing is more important than defeating this dagger to the heart of our democracy,” Schumer said during a press call Sunday.

Schumer accused President Trump and his Senate allies of trying to “disenfranchise millions of Americans and undermine democracy by pushing this despicable SAVE Act” to counter the Republican Party’s political problems driven by a weakening economy and rising costs.

“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,” Schumer declared.

Schumer and a group of Democratic-allied experts framed the bill during the call as an extensive effort to suppress the vote in future elections.

“They talk a lot about voter ID, but the SAVE Act is not, not, not a voter ID bill. … It is rather a voter suppression bill,” Schumer said.

Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election lawyer, said the mail-in ballot provision in the base Republican bill is so unworkable that it’s designed to end the popular practice of voting by mail.

He said that requiring photocopies of voter ID when requesting or submitting absentee ballots will spawn controversies and confusion.

“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?” Elias asked during the press call hosted by Schumer.

“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,” he said.

Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights law organization, who also joined the call, argued that the new voter ID requirements being pushed by Republicans aren’t necessary and will only restrict millions of people from voting.

“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,” she said.

Schumer told reporters Sunday that he’s not sure what exactly Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) will bring to the floor this week but he said that Democrats have worked extensively on a game plan to counter their tactics and arguments.

“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,” he said.

Updated at 7:53 a.m. EDT

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