Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is not a happy man. He is displeased with the Senate's failure to pass the SAVE America voter id law, and in that, he has a lot of company. Speaking to the Senate on Wednesday, Senator Lee exploded in the lower chamber, citing a report that had found 30,000 non-citizens on the voting rolls of several states; and that's likely the tip of the iceberg.
With the 2026 midterms only weeks away, it's a startlingly valid concern.
Firebrand conservative Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, slammed both Democrats and Republicans who have resisted passage of the SAVE America Act after a report found that 30,000 noncitizens were "mistakenly" registered to vote in states across the country since 2000.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens have been added to U.S. voter rolls since 2000. The outlet attributed the erroneous registrations to "software glitches and clerical errors" and said that its review suggested "inadvertent bureaucratic failures, rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally." The outlet said that this raised "questions about whether legislative efforts to require proof of citizenship for voter registration would eliminate the issue."
Look, it doesn't matter whether these people are registered by mistake or by design. That's not the point. The point is that they are registered at all, and that some of them have almost certainly voted. Oh, that's against the law, Democrats will complain, but clearly that's not working.
Mike Lee has been pushing the SAVE America Act since he introduced it into the Senate earlier this year, including demanding that the GOP toss aside the filibuster if necessary to get it done. Now he's growing impatient, as are a lot of us.
However, while speaking on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Lee, who introduced the SAVE America Act earlier this year, said that "even though we have laws that prohibit things like noncitizen voting, those laws have been rendered difficult and essentially impossible to enforce."
"That thing that they claim never happens, voter fraud or noncitizen voting, just keeps happening over and over and over again," he railed.
Here's the thing: Even if the Senate leadership removed a certain digit from a certain bodily orifice and the SAVE America Act were passed today, it would be too late to affect the 2026 midterms. This legislation would not close every gap but it would close a lot of them, it would go a considerable way towards increasing our election integrity, but in 2026, in these critical midterms, it's going to be up to us to bring this thing beyond the margin of fraud. We did it in 2024 and we can do it again.
The simple fact is that the SAVE America Act won't pass in this Congress. Senator Lee has bent every effort to get this done, as have a bunch of his colleagues, but barring some truly unforeseen miracle, this isn't happening before the midterm election. Maybe — just maybe — it will pass in the post-election lame duck session. But it not then? We have no idea what the next Congress will look like, but if the Democrats seize control of either house, we can kiss election security goodbye.
That's it. That's where we are. It's up to we, the voters, now. We have to win this. We have to win every winnable race. We have to turn out. The Silent Majority has to step up. We have to show up, in voting booths from Bangor to San Diego, from Miami to Fairbanks, from Houston to Honolulu, and get this done. It has come to that. It's up to us. No excuses. If you have to bite your tongue over a certain candidate, bite it, and vote. The republic is in our hands now.