After years of being paid by politicians, Rachel Bovard now tells us what they want us to think. We are shocked, truly.
The Free Press: Free to Publish Whatever Makes Donors Happy
Rachel Bovard published an opinion piece in The Free Press on February 10, 2026, arguing that voter identification laws are common sense safeguards for American elections. Her article makes several claims that deserve careful scrutiny, and when you examine the evidence, a very different picture emerges than what she paints.
Bovard is vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she advises on policy matters after spending over a decade working on Capitol Hill in the House and Senate. Her institutional affiliation matters because the SAVE America Act she champions has been promoted primarily by conservative organizations and Republican lawmakers.
The Core Problem: Solving a Problem That Does Not Exist
Bovard argues that federal law is “lax” on noncitizen voting and that the SAVE America Act would fix a “gaping hole” in election integrity. This framing requires immediate scrutiny because the premise is factually wrong.
It has been illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections since 1996, when Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The penalties are severe: fines, imprisonment, inadmissibility, and deportation. A noncitizen who registers to vote can also lose the ability to ever become a citizen.
More importantly, the available evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare. After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found just 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast. That is 0.0001%.
A Georgia audit in 2024 found 20 suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine had a history of voting, and all 20 were referred to law enforcement. In Utah, after an exhaustive review of over 2 million registered voters between April 2025 and January 2026, state officials identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.
The Heritage Foundation, which has actively promoted noncitizen voting claims, has a database of voter fraud cases. When The Washington Post reviewed this database, they found only 85 cases relating to allegations of noncitizens voting between 2002 and 2023. Most of these involved legal immigrants, and many had been incorrectly told they could vote.
Bovard invokes the 2020 election in Georgia, where Trump lost by nearly 12,000 votes, and suggests that noncitizen voting could have made the difference. But there is zero evidence to support this claim. The math simply does not work. You would need thousands of noncitizens voting illegally to swing a statewide election, and the data shows that such voting is essentially nonexistent.
The Historical Context Bovard Ignores
Bovard writes as if noncitizen voting is a novel threat that demands immediate federal intervention. But this ignores nearly a century of American history.
As many as 40 states allowed noncitizens to vote at various points in our history. The practice was common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in states with large immigrant populations. Noncitizens could vote in Kentucky until 1891, in New Hampshire until 1905, and in Arkansas until 1926. When Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926, it marked the end of an era.
The decision to restrict noncitizen voting in the early twentieth century was driven by nativism, wartime xenophobia following World War I, and a desire to restrict the political power of new immigrants, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe. That history should give us pause when we hear contemporary arguments about the need to restrict voting based on citizenship status.
If Bovard wants to claim that only citizens should vote, she is making an argument that is only about 100 years old in American practice. The notion that this reflects some timeless democratic principle is historically inaccurate.
The Georgia Myth and the Racial Turnout Gap
Bovard points to Georgia’s 2021 voter ID law for mail-in ballots as evidence that voter suppression warnings were overblown. She notes that Georgia broke records for voter turnout in the 2022 midterm elections and that Black voters reported no issues at the polls.
This argument is deeply misleading. While overall turnout was high in Georgia during the 2022 midterms, a Brennan Center analysis revealed that the racial turnout gap was larger than any point in the past decade. White turnout was 8.6 percentage points higher than nonwhite turnout in the 2022 general election, roughly 50% higher than in the 2014 and 2018 midterms.
The Brennan Center calculated that if nonwhite voters had turned out at the same rate as white voters in 2022, they would have cast over 267,000 additional ballots. Most of these, about 176,000, would have been cast by Black voters. To put that in perspective, Senator Raphael Warnock would have needed only 43,690 votes to avoid the December 2022 runoff.
The narrative that “nothing bad happened” in Georgia ignores the fact that high overall turnout can mask significant problems when the increase is driven entirely by one racial group while another group’s participation declines. That is exactly what happened in Georgia.
The Academic Evidence on Voter ID Laws
Bovard dismisses concerns about voter suppression as “mindlessness” and claims that the voter-suppression theory was “simply wrong.” But the academic research tells a more complicated story.
A comprehensive study by Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson at UC San Diego analyzed validated voting data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study between 2008 and 2012. They found that strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans.
The study found that Latino turnout was 10.3 percentage points lower in states with strict photo ID laws compared to states without such requirements. For mixed-race Americans, the effect was even larger: a 12.8 percentage point decline. In primary elections, strict voter ID laws depressed Latino turnout by 6.3 percentage points and Black turnout by 1.6 percentage points.
Perhaps most significantly, the study found that voter ID laws skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right. The research showed that Democratic turnout dropped by an estimated 7.7 percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws were in place, compared to a 4.6 percentage point drop for Republicans. For strong liberals, the estimated drop in turnout was an alarming 10.7 percentage points, compared to just 2.8 points for strong conservatives.
The gap in turnout between Republicans and Democrats doubled from 2.3 points to 5.6 points when strict photo ID laws were instituted. The gap between conservatives and liberals more than doubled from 4.7 to 12.6 points.
This is not “mindlessness.” This is peer-reviewed social science that directly contradicts Bovard’s claims.
The SAVE Act Would Disenfranchise Millions of Eligible Voters
The SAVE America Act, as described by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice, would require American citizens to show documentary proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. Research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents.
According to recent studies cited by the Bipartisan Policy Center, 9% of all eligible voters do not have or do not have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship. Fifty-two percent of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name. Eleven percent of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate.
Kansas offers a cautionary tale. Before its documentary proof of citizenship requirement took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After the law was adopted, the documentary proof requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering than noncitizens.
The Brennan Center found that the SAVE Act would disproportionately harm younger voters, voters of color, women whose married names differ from their birth certificates, and low-income Americans who may lack the resources to obtain required documents.
The Real Purpose of the SAVE Act
Bovard argues that the SAVE Act would “build public trust” in elections. But this framing obscures what the legislation actually does and why it is being pushed now.
The SAVE Act is part of a broader pattern of voting restrictions that have been enacted primarily by Republican-controlled state legislatures since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement. These restrictions have consistently been shown to reduce turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies while having minimal effects on Republican voters.
The Brennan Center characterized the SAVE Act as “an attack on the freedom to vote.” The Center for American Progress noted that the legislation would “invert the responsibility to verify a person’s eligibility and citizenship status from election officials and the federal government to individual voters.”
This matters because it shifts the burden of proof in a way that creates new barriers for eligible citizens while addressing a problem that essentially does not exist. The noncitizen voting rate in federal elections is so close to zero that it is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Who does the SAVE Act REALLY benefit?
Bovard asks readers to believe that the SAVE Act is a common sense measure supported by most Americans. She is correct that polls show majority support for voter identification requirements. But popularity does not equal wisdom, and the gap between a popular proposal and a good policy can be enormous.
The evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare, that voter ID laws disproportionately reduce turnout among minority voters and Democrats, and that the SAVE Act would create new barriers for millions of eligible American citizens.
The question we should ask is not whether most Americans support voter ID. It is whether the SAVE Act solves a real problem or creates new ones. The evidence strongly suggests the latter.
Bovard claims that the SAVE Act would “legitimize” democracy. But democracy is not legitimized by making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. It is delegitimized by such efforts.
If we want to restore trust in elections, we should focus on things that actually affect election outcomes: adequate polling places, reasonable voting hours, accurate vote counting, and robust protection against hacking and manipulation. The SAVE Act does none of these things. Instead, it manufactures a crisis to justify restricting the franchise.
That is not common sense. That is voter suppression dressed up in patriotic language.
Bovard's remarkable independent thinking—honed over a decade on Capitol Hill, a Masters in political management, and employment at an organization that lobbies for exactly what she recommends—leads her to conclusions that will shock absolutely no one who follows money in Washington. Read the revelation here:
---
Works Cited
Bipartisan Policy Center. (2026, February 2). Five things to know about the SAVE Act. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/
Brennan Center for Justice. (2026, February 2). New SAVE Act bills would still block millions of Americans from voting. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting
Brennan Center for Justice. (2022, December 16). Georgia’s racial turnout gap grew in 2022. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-racial-turnout-gap-grew-2022
Hajnal, Z., Lajevardi, N., & Nielson, L. (n.d.). Voter identification laws and the suppression of minority votes. University of California, San Diego. https://pages.ucsd.edu/~zhajnal/page5/documents/voterIDhajnaletal.pdf
Loving, S., & Morris, K. (2022, December 16). Georgia’s racial turnout gap grew in 2022. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-racial-turnout-gap-grew-2022
NPR. (2024, October 12). 6 facts about false noncitizen voting claims and the election. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-5147789/voting-election-2024-noncitizen-fact-check-trump
Wikipedia. (2025). Non-citizen suffrage in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage_in_the_United_States