Passing the SAVE America Act Will Not Significantly Increase Election Integrity. Ditching the Electoral College Will Increase the Security of Presidential Elections, But Republicans Aren't Interested.
If Republicans were REALLY interested in election integrity, they would be pushing for a Constitutional amendment to make it harder to steal presidential elections. Yet, I have seen no evidence that they are making a serious attempt to amend the Constitution. Sure, they are trying to pass the SAVE America Act, a law that addresses the nearly nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting by enacting ID requirements that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands or millions of voters. And while you won’t find me quoting actors as sources of information very often, Elizabeth Banks is on target when she describes how the SAVE America Act could disenfranchise those whose names on their ID don’t match their names on their birth certificates.
There are several other problems with the SAVE America Act. It would impose an unconstitutional poll tax on those who need to get the required ID. It would impose criminal liability on election workers who would risk imprisonment if they make a mistake. And historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that the SAVE America Act
would also require states to hand over their voting lists to the federal government for processing through a government database used to screen for noncitizens applying for federal programs—confusingly also called the SAVE system, although it stands for “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements”—even though that procedure has a rate of false positives as high as 14%.
Richardson cited a thorough report by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune about the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. Their story concluded with Brianna Lennon, the county clerk for Boone County, Missouri saying:
This is not ready for prime time. And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.
Republicans are willing to overlook these problems in order to stop a handful of illegal votes while they ignore a much greater threat to our democracy—the Electoral College, an institution that has given the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes in two of the last seven elections. According to a September 2024 Gallup poll, 82% of Democrats wanted to get rid of the Electoral College as compared to only 32% of Republicans wanting to get rid of it. I’ll let you guess why Republicans want to cling to a system that has thwarted the will of the majority of voters.
Passing an amendment to abolish the Electoral College will simplify elections and remove any possibility of using strained legal theories to hijack a byzantine electoral process. It will ensure that no politician in the future will be able to summon a mindless mob of marauding morons to descend on the Capitol on January 6 with the intent of thwarting the will of the people. And, most importantly, it will make it much harder to steal the election by requiring those who would do so to manufacture up to ten times as many votes.
How many votes would we need to manufacture if we want to rig an election that was decided by the Electoral College? We can get a rough answer to that question by looking at the margins of victories in six swing states in 2020. (Source: USA Today)
How many votes would a cheater need to manufacture to nearly guarantee a victory in the Electoral College in each of the six swing states? 100,000 votes would have done the trick for five of the six swing states based on the 2020 results. Of course, someone who wanted to rig the election couldn’t know ahead of time just how many votes they would have to manufacture in order to steal the election. To ensure success, a cheater would want to rig far more votes than the minimum he thought would be necessary. Let’s be conservative and assume that someone rigging an election with six swing states would want to rig 200,000 votes per state, for a total of 1.2 million votes. You might object that this is overestimating the number of votes a cheater would need to rig, and you would be right. But I am intentionally overestimating the rigged votes needed with the Electoral College in order to strengthen my case that a cheater would need to rig even more votes if we got rid of the Electoral College.
Now let’s imagine what it would look like if we got rid of the Electoral College How many votes would we a cheater need to rig for their candidate to win the national popular vote? Let’s look at the election results from 1940 - 2024 for guidance.1
As you can see, the difference in the popular vote between winning and losing candidates ranged from 118,574 to nearly 18,000,000. A cheater who rigged 1.2 million votes would have won only 3 of the last 22 elections. A cheater who rigged 5 million votes would have won 11 of the last 22 elections. And a cheater would have had to rig over 7 million votes to rig 14 of the last 22 elections.
Of course, no one could rig millions of votes in just a few places because that many excess votes in a few localities would be so obvious that even a blind sloth shot up with Jack Daniels would detect it. Manufacturing and casting that many ballots would require a nation-wide conspiracy, and the more people who were in on the conspiracy, the more likely someone would trip up and reveal the conspiracy’s existence.
If the Republicans were REALLY interested in election integrity, they would be at the forefront of a movement to get rid of the Electoral College. But of course, they are not. They have won the presidency in two of the last seven elections through the Electoral College, despite having lost in the popular vote. Obtaining power is more important to them than election integrity or than making sure that every American’s vote carries the same weight.
The data for this table comes from the historical data compiled by the American Presidency Project. However, there was a discrepancy in the number of electoral votes for the 2016 race between that recorded in the American Presidency Project and other sources. APP says Trump won by 306 - 232, but thy had a footnote indicating that this was not the final result. I used the official result, listed on page 6 of the 2016 Federal Election Commission Report. (That is page 11 of the PDF.) The FEC says that Trump won by 304 votes to Clinton’s 227.