Margaret Imber lives in Lewiston.

My YouTube videos are increasingly populated by political ads. Normally, I sigh and wait until the “skip” button appears before returning to my content. But one ad caught and held my attention recently.

Funded by a dark money PAC, the ad basically argues that if you need a license to drive and to own a gun, you should need a license to vote and congratulates Sen. Susan Collins for her support of the SAVE America Act currently being debated in the Senate.

There are three problems with the argument, and with Sen. Collins’ support for this bill. First, voting is not like owning a car or gun. Cars and guns are potentially dangerous items that require skill to use safely. Licenses are how our communities ensure that those who own cars and guns know how to use them.

A vote, in contrast, is an expression of citizen belief and a guarantee that the beliefs of citizens will shape the course of government policies and actions in our communities. I may think your belief is dangerous (and you may think the same of mine), but the essence of democracy is the conviction that each citizen’s vote matters.

The second problem with the arguments in support of the SAVE Act is that they assume there is a problem that legislation must solve. After all, proponents argue, if a vote is fraudulent, it inherently challenges the legitimacy of elections. If there were a problem with fraudulent votes, this position might be more difficult to challenge. 

But there is no problem with fraudulent votes in American elections. Studies on the right (Heritage Foundation) and the left (Brennan Center) conclude that instances of non-citizen voting between 1999 and 2023 range between 41 and 77 cases. Less than .001% of votes cast in U.S. elections are cast by individuals who do not have the right to vote. This number is too small to have any effect on the outcome of an election. If someone tells you that illegal immigrants are voting and swaying U.S. elections, they are lying to you, or at least, repeating the lies that someone told them.

It seems absurd to go to the effort and expense of changing the law to target less than 100 cases in 24 years. I can only conclude that the goal of the SAVE Act is not to prevent people from improperly voting. I think, more obviously, the goal is to prevent many more citizens whose opinions the defenders of the SAVE Act do not share from voting.  

For instance, the law requires citizens to present a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship when they vote. Your Real ID driver’s license won’t work (because Maine licenses don’t indicate citizenship status). Half of Americans don’t have a passport. Most of them are young, live in rural areas or are non-white.

Getting a passport costs between $65 and $165. To get a passport you need a birth certificate, which in Maine will cost you $10-$15. And ladies, if you took your husband’s name upon marriage, your legal name and the name on your birth certificate will differ. More hassles, more money, fewer votes.

The third problem that Sen. Collins’ support for the SAVE Act presents is that the legislation is offered in bad faith. Supporters of the SAVE Act don’t expect the Senate to pass the bill. But if the bill fails, they will argue that the outcome of the elections this November is fraudulent, because there was no law to prevent fraudulent voting. This, as we’ve seen, is a lie.

It makes you wonder what Susan Collins and the supporters of the SAVE Act are so afraid of, unless it’s democracy.