New Mexico's U.S. House representatives vote against Republican-backed voter registration bill

On Wednesday, the U.S. House passed a bill that would require people to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote in federal elections. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratically controlled Senate but gives Republicans an opportunity to talk about immigration and election security before the general election in November.

The vote on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act was primarily along party lines, with five Democrats voting in favor. The bill would amend the National Voter Registration Act.

Non-citizens voting is already illegal in federal elections, and there are few confirmed cases of non-citizens illegally casting a ballot. The Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 general election, out of 23.5 million votes, election officials only referred an estimated 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting.

“I think the SAVE Act is mostly just political posturing,” said Cory Sukala, a government professor at New Mexico State University. “Immigration has been a hot button issue this summer, but legislation to address it has been held up largely as a political football. With the SAVE Act, Republican legislators are able to bring up those issues and keep using the issue of immigration politically, even if the SAVE Act doesn’t really touch on or address the issue of immigration in any meaningful way.”

New Mexico’s Democratic House representatives, Teresa Leger Fernández, Melanie Stansbury and Gabe Vasquez, all opposed the SAVE Act.

“Voting is our most sacred right, and we must do everything in our power to ensure that it is protected and accessible to all citizens,” Vasquez said. “This bill, under the guise of safeguarding our electoral process, would disenfranchise millions of Americans, including servicemembers, Native Americans, women and rural communities.”

Democrats have said the bill could create hurdles to voter registration, in part because military and tribal identification documents do not meet the requirements laid out in the legislation.

The New Mexico GOP is in support of the bill.

“Under Joe Biden, we’ve had an incredible border crisis. ... What this bill essentially would do is it would allow states to have the tools and resources to be able to verify citizenship and really define the problem of what the scope of illegal immigrants voting in U.S. elections is,” said Ash Soular, NM GOP spokesperson.

Sukala said that in the unlikely event the bill passes the Senate, it might not have a large impact on how people vote nationally, although it could create some administrative burdens in states like New Mexico where forms of identification allowed to register as a voter are comparatively broad.

The legislation could also have a notable impact on election administrators, Sukala said.

The bill contains a provision that would make elections officials civilly liable if they failed to meet its requirements, and Sukala believes such a measure could make the exodus of experienced election officials, which can already be seen in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, worse.

“These elections officials, who in many parts of the country are just private citizens who haven’t actually been elected to any office and are functionally just administrators, they would now be able to be personally sued over doing their job,” Sukala said. “And that mirrors similar legislation that we’ve seen in places like Texas that has targeted elections administrators, and it’s part of a larger trend of distrust of elections and a rise of conspiracy theories regarding elections that we’ve seen since 2020.”