In the last post, I discussed the magnitude of potential errors due to ineligible voters in the election results in the US, and proposed a very generous confidence interval of 0.01%, based on the results of a recent investigation from the state of Georgia, a with substantial amount of overestimation and scaling to be applicable to the worst case scenario in terms of the percentage of the immigrant population. I applied the reliability test based on this confidence interval to the much contested results of the 2020 presidential election in the swing states, and argued that even the smallest difference was more than 24 times the calculated margin of error. As such, the problem of ineligible individuals voting in the elections, while being a valid problem, does not seem to have a significant, and specifically, outcome changing, effect in the elections. Nevertheless, both the Congress and the President are taking very significant actions to address this arguably very insignificant problem.

Congress has prioritized enacting the so-called SAVE Act. Among its core provisions, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require those seeking to register to vote to provide documentary proof of citizenship. For most people born in the United States, this would require either a passport or certified birth certificate. While imposing reasonable requirements to ensure integrity of the elections by, e.g., preventing non-citizens from registering to vote sounds very sensible, to be pragmatic, one should also consider the potential problems and complications that could come with each measure, and somehow address them as well, in the same bill or action, or separately.

Take for example using passport as a documentary proof of citizenship, and consider the fact that younger and less affluent voters are very likely to lack passports. Therefore, it is not very practical to rely on passport as the main document to prove citizenship. Relying on the birth certificate, on the other hand, to prove citizenship does not come without its own problems either. Please note that a valid birth certificate proves citizenship of the owner of the birth certificate, not the holder. To establish the ownership, one would need another form of identification, one with a recent photo, and with matching information with the birth certificate. While the probability of a court authorized name change is not very high, adopting husband’s last name is very common for most married women. In such cases, a recent photo id and the birth certificate will not be sufficient to reliably establish citizenship, and a third form of document linking the new last name to the maiden name is also required.

While satisfying the above requirements is certainly not impossible, it does add extra burden for a significant fraction of the US population, possibly in tens of millions, or maybe even more than 100M. And that’s all to address a problem that as explained above and in this previous post, seems to be quite insignificant.

But the practical problems do not end here. The President has already issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship. While the order is being challenged in courts, and the early indications are that judges are considering this order as going blatantly against the text of the Constitution, the fact remains that the idea is to disallow using the birth certificate as a proof of citizenship. With the passport as the only remaining document for US born individuals to establish citizenship, it may be argued that the idea is to target the younger and less affluent citizens, and prevent them from registering to vote.

Whether these new laws and executive orders will eventually become effective, and whether they will benefit a particular party, remains to be seen. But, in any case, they seem to be an awful amount of time and money spent in the Congress to develop the new laws and in the courts to defend them, only to fix a problem that seemed to be very insignificant to begin with, without any material impact even in the results of the most contested elections of 2020. For an administration that takes pride in cutting unnecessary costs and saving money for the American people, spending so much money and resources on this insignificant problem does not seem to be very justified.