SAVE Act would mean long drives for millions of American voters
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More than 5 million voting-age Americans would have to drive an estimated hour or more to present their citizenship documents to register to vote, as would be required under the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
Why it matters: President Trump is pushing the SAVE Act as necessary to secure future elections, but it could complicate voting for many American citizens.
- The SAVE Act would require people to present documents in person to an "appropriate elections official" to register to vote — effectively killing online and mail-in registration.
- More than 21 million voting-age Americans lack the documents needed to register to vote under the SAVE Act, such as a birth certificate or passport, per an estimate from the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy nonprofit.
What we found: The average American lives about 20 minutes by car from their nearest election office, per an Axios analysis. Those are county or municipal offices that manage voter registration and voting.
- That's without factoring in traffic.
For rural Americans in western states, that more than doubles to 49 minutes.
- At the extreme end in the continental U.S., Apache County, Arizona, residents have an average drive of 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Yes, but: The SAVE Act doesn't define who counts as an "appropriate elections official."
- "Exactly what that means would have to be determined," says Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director for the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center.
- States may include other locations, such as motor vehicle departments or polling places.
Friction point: "Getting there is just one problem," says Matthew Weil, vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
- "A lot of them don't have regular office hours ... The office being open during any kind of reasonable hours is going to be another challenge."
For the record: "President Trump's SAVE America Act is commonsense legislation supported by the vast majority of Americans — including 90% who support voter ID — who want to ensure our elections are secure and that only American citizens vote in American elections," White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Axios.
What's next: The SAVE Act is stuck in the Senate — but several Republican states are pushing similar measures covering their residents.
Methodology: To find the average driving time, we divided the country into a grid of five-mile-wide cells. For each cell, we identified the closest elections office in the same state (as the crow flies), then used OSRM to calculate driving directions from the center of that cell to that office.
To estimate each cell's population, we identified the overlapping census tracts, and calculated what share of each tract's area fell within the cell. We assumed an evenly distributed population within each tract, then multiplied each tract's total population by that area share. We then summed the results to get a population estimate for the cell. Population numbers were taken from the 2024 American Community Survey.
Finally, we used each cell's population estimate to weight its driving distance, producing population-weighted average driving distances.
