Democrats over the weekend rebuffed Republicans’ attempt to attach anti-trans policies to the SAVE Act, a bill that would require people to show proof of citizenship in order to vote in elections, such as a passport or a birth certificate.

For several weeks, the White House has been claiming that the SAVE Act will prevent trans people from participating in sports with others of their gender and that it will ban trans health care for trans youth, even though neither of those provisions is actually in the bill.

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Republicans are pushing hard for a bill that would disenfranchise trans voters

Last week, the administration convinced Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to introduce an amendment to add those measures to the SAVE Act.

In a weekend voting session, however, Democrats defeated the amendment 49-41.

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“While Republicans keep the Senate in session to try and pass their dangerous SAVE act, they also tried to push through a ridiculous ban on transgender athletes,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) posted to social media. “We blocked it.”

The president has stressed the importance of this bill to him, saying that he will not sign any other legislation until Congress sends him the SAVE Act. He has been saying for years that undocumented immigrants vote en masse in U.S. elections, something there is no evidence of. Even conservative attempts to estimate the number of non-citizens who have voted illegally in U.S. elections have only found a handful of such instances.

While most people trying to pass a bill would oppose adding unrelated measures since they would just give lawmakers more reasons to vote against the legislation, the president is apparently convinced that the anti-trans riders would make the bill so popular that it would have to pass.

“It seems as if he believes that attaching these anti-trans riders to the SAVE America Act would improve its chances in the Senate,” said Advocates for Trans Equality senior policy analyst Caius Willingham. “Putting those riders into the SAVE America Act would actually turn off more senators than it would inspire them.”

LGBTQ+ advocates opposed the SAVE Act even before the riders were proposed, in part because the voter documentation requirements would be more burdensome for transgender people, whose name and gender on their IDs might not match what appears on their birth certificates. Moreover, people who changed their names after marriage may have difficulty providing proof of citizenship.

“This bill would create onerous restrictions relating to identity documents for a wide variety of people who are eligible to vote, particularly transgender people, intersex people, and married people who have changed their names,” read a letter sent by a coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations – including HRC, Advocates for Trans Equality, and PFLAG – earlier this month.

“We’ve already seen the chaos, confusion, and harassment that comes with legislators banning certain forms of identification through recent changes in Kansas, which has now revoked state-sanctioned driver’s licenses from more than 1,700 transgender Kansans without warning. A law like the SAVE Act would only further cause bureaucratic confusion and disenfranchise wide swaths of people.”

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