A Rutgers professor appeared on MSNBC this week to argue that the SAVE Act — a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in American elections — would effectively hand democracy over to "moneyed white straight men." Brittany Cooper, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and African Studies at Rutgers, appeared on Ali Velshi's show on June 18, described the Trump administration as "stridently anti-women, stridently anti-queer," and declared that citizenship verification at the ballot box is simultaneously racist, sexist, and homophobic.
Three charges. Not one holds up.
You can watch MSNBC lay out their argument here...
The racism charge first. The SAVE Act's requirement applies identically to every racial group — citizenship is the qualification, not race. The Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID law 6-3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in 2008 without identifying a constitutional problem. Polling consistently shows majority support for voter ID requirements among Black and Hispanic Americans — one Rasmussen survey found 72 percent of Black Americans support photo ID requirements at the ballot box. Mexico requires photo ID to vote. India requires it. South Africa requires it. Most European democracies require it. If documentary proof of citizenship is racist, it is a remarkably common form of racism among diverse nations with no obvious stake in American politics.
On the sexism claim: women support voter ID at rates comparable to men, and the 84 percent approval figure that has been widely cited for the SAVE Act represents the full American public — which is mostly women. But the more fundamental point is this: every non-citizen vote cast in an American federal election doesn't simply add to the total — it dilutes every citizen's vote. That includes every American woman's vote. If women's political power matters, protecting the franchise from dilution is how you protect it. The SAVE Act does exactly that.
On the homophobia charge: what is the mechanism? How does requiring documentary proof of citizenship discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation? LGBTQ+ Americans are citizens. Their votes are protected by the SAVE Act, not threatened by it. Cooper didn't explain the connection on air because there is no connection. The charge was asserted, not argued.
The same question applies to Cooper's "tradwife" claim — that the SAVE Act is secretly a plot to return women to domestic roles. What is the mechanism? Voter citizenship requirements exist across the political spectrum in democracies worldwide. H.R. 22 is an election integrity measure, not a domestic policy. The connection between the two exists only in assertion, not in logic.
Cooper's area of expertise is Women's and Gender Studies — not constitutional law, election law, or political science. Her 2018 book is subtitled "A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower." She is an advocate with a faculty appointment, not a neutral expert in electoral systems, and what she offered on Velshi's show was advocacy, not analysis. MSNBC presented it as the latter. It was the former.
On the broader charge that this administration is "stridently anti-women": the administration that passed the Laken Riley Act — legislation requiring the detention of illegal aliens charged with violent crimes, named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student murdered by a man with no legal right to be in the country — is not easily characterized as anti-women. Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Sheridan Gorman were murdered by people here illegally. The policies Cooper is opposing are specifically designed to prevent more of those deaths. The question of which side of this debate has acted to protect American women has a documented answer.
Here is what the SAVE Act actually is. H.R. 22 requires documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, birth certificate, or REAL ID indicating citizenship — to register to vote in federal elections. Federal law already requires applicants to attest that they are citizens when registering. The SAVE Act adds document verification to that attestation. Forty-two states already have some form of voter ID requirement. This bill closes a federal loophole. It is not a literacy test, a property requirement, or a scheme targeting any demographic. It is citizenship verification for a process — voting in federal elections — that is legally reserved for citizens.
The argument that this constitutes bigotry requires believing that 84 percent of Americans, across every demographic Cooper claims to champion, are motivated by racial and gender supremacy. It requires treating "prove you're American before you vote in American elections" as a radical and discriminatory demand. It requires ignoring the fact that most of the world's democracies have reached the same conclusion without controversy.
Every claim Cooper made on that set — the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, the tradwife conspiracy — went unanswered on air.
This is the answer.