Image Credit: Gov. Bill Lee/ Facebook & Canva
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only.
By Anita Wadhwani [Tennessee Lookout -CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] –
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has signed into law a new citizenship vetting process for voter registration slated to take effect in 2028 should the federal government make a national database of non-citizens available to county elections officials across the nation.
The legislation, brought by Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin and House Leader William Lamberth of Sumner County, both Republicans, was approved along party lines with little debate during the legislative session and mirrors the Trump administration’s goals for stricter citizenship verification for voter legislation.
If the U.S. Department of Homeland Security establishes a secure access portal for county elections administrators, Tennessee voter registrations will be compared to the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE program, currently used to verify eligibility for certain public benefits.
Proponents of the stricter vetting process argued it adds another safeguard to ensure the integrity of Tennessee elections.
Opponents, including the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, called it “an answer in search of a problem that does not exist.”
Current law already requires voters to attest to their citizenship status when registering to vote. The state then verifies citizenship using state and federal data sources.
The League of Women Voters has long opposed using the separate national SAVE database due to its error rates, said Debby Gould, president of the organization’s Tennessee chapter.
In states such as Texas, which has deployed the SAVE checks for voter registration, election officials mistakenly flagged voters as noncitizens at high rates, up to 14% in some counties, according to reporting by Pro Publica and the Texas Tribune.
“So we have a lot of concerns about that, and really believe that federal intrusion on the laws of how elections are carried out does not end well. It just leads to new problems,” Gould said.
Separately the similarly-named federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act would require states such as Tennessee to create mechanisms to verify immigration status upon voter registration. The measure, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year but has so far stalled out in the U.S. Senate because of a Democratic filibuster, requiring it to receive 60 votes to pass.
