This story was originally published by Capital B News.
When Courtney Patterson was born on his family’s farm in Lenoir County, North Carolina, 80 years ago, he was fortunate that a country doctor recorded his birth, ensuring that he would have a document later.
“But many other people who grew up with me didn’t even have that,” Patterson recalled. Babies were usually delivered at home by midwives who were illiterate. On the rare occasions a doctor visited, he might leave with a ham or produce — payment from families with little cash. Documentation of births, if it existed at all, was written down in a family Bible.
That absence of a legal record — which springs from a segregated health system and informal birth practices — is now part of a bitter political fight over voter eligibility.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a Republican-backed bill that passed the House and is currently being debated in the Senate, would require people to show proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to register to vote and to provide photo identification at the polls. Voting rights advocates say that the measure, known as the SAVE America Act, would narrow ballot access, especially for Black communities.
Some 21 million voting-age Americans don’t have readily available proof of citizenship, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. But the burden of this lack hits Black Americans with particular force.
While birth certificates are frequently viewed as universal, access to them is uneven, especially for Black Americans born in the Jim Crow South. One-fifth of Black Americans born in 1939 and 1940 were never issued birth certificates, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And only about one-third of Black Americans have passports, while half of all American adults do.
“This isn’t an ID law,” Demetria McCain, the director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Capital B, referring to the SAVE America Act. “Your driver’s license isn’t going to help you, in this instance, to prove your citizenship. You’ve got to have something like a passport or a birth certificate.”
Modern-day poll tax
Documentation barriers aren’t only rooted in policy and history; they’re also a matter of cost.
Obtaining a birth certificate often means taking time off work, traveling — sometimes long distances — and paying fees. Securing a passport could be more expensive and time-intensive, requiring payment of application fees and submission of photographs. Hurdles compound quickly for hourly workers.
All of that costs money, said McCain, before drawing a direct line to history and the mechanisms that were used in the past to prevent Black Americans from voting. “And guess what the poll tax was about? It was about money,” she said, referring to the fees that people had to pay to exercise their right to vote.
The SAVE America Act, if signed into law, could also disrupt how many Black Americans first enter the electorate.
For decades, voter registration has orbited around Black civic life: churches, historically Black fraternities and sororities, and other community organizations. Those drives seek to meet people where they are, whether they’re in the foyers after Sunday services or outside grocery stores. But proving citizenship requires having formal documentation verified.
“And you can’t do that at a church registration drive,” McCain said. “You can’t do that in front of a grocery store.”
This shift could move voter registration away from community spaces and toward government offices, places that require time, transportation, and money to access. The result is a system that disproportionately burdens the very communities those drives were designed to reach.
Additionally, the SAVE America Act could inject administrative risks into the voting landscape, McCain said. Matching voter rolls with documentation raises the possibility of introducing errors such as wrongful purges. Even small discrepancies could trigger mismatches. And people with common names, as well as women who have changed their names after marriage, could face heightened scrutiny if their papers don’t perfectly align.
Noncitizen voting is rare
At the same time, the issue that the legislation claims to remedy — noncitizen voting — is vanishingly rare. That’s in part because existing law already requires voters to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury.
To Patterson, who has served on the Lenoir County Board of Elections for close to 15 years, this disconnect between reality and the SAVE America Act’s espoused ambitions only reinforces his view that the legislation is less about security than about access for some and not for others.
“The whole time that I’ve been on the board,” Patterson said, “we have never had to investigate” a case where someone has falsely claimed citizenship to vote. What he sees in the bill, he said, is behavior similar to that of earlier eras of U.S. history, when practices such as requiring someone to take a literacy test or guess the number of jellybeans in a jar were used to block Black Americans from registering to vote.
“It’s the same pattern,” he told Capital B.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also has made historical parallels: “It’s Jim Crow 2.0,” the Democrat told MS Now’s Morning Joe in February. “What they’re trying to do here is the same thing that was done in the South for decades to prevent people of color from voting.”
Black voters ages 50 and older are less likely to identify as or lean Republican (7%) than those under 50 (17%), according to the Pew Research Center.
Bracing for what’s next
Supporters of the SAVE America Act, including President Donald Trump, maintain that it’s needed to secure elections, citing unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential contest.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican and the longest-serving Black senator, has defended the legislation, asserting on Saturday that it would “make it harder to cheat.” Scott has historically received a small share of the Black vote, showing a gap between his and his party’s support among these voters and his role in influencing policies that disproportionately affect them.
In response to these efforts, organizers in and beyond North Carolina are preparing for a scenario in which the legislation is signed into law, despite the uphill battle it faces in the Senate.
Patterson works with a network of nonprofit organizations that focus on building a more just political system, including through voting education and election protection. Part of that work involves helping people, particularly Black elders, to make sure that they have everything they need to cast a ballot.
It’s been years, Patterson said, since he’s had a conversation with someone who didn’t have a birth certificate — many of this generation have begun to pass away. But he added that his work is guided by his personal awareness of a time when people were born in circumstances that prevented them from having a documented birth.
This kind of grassroots work, he said, has long served as a bulwark against voter suppression, and it continues today — sometimes in new forms.
Louisiana advocates push for state Voting Rights Act
In Louisiana, voting rights advocates this month publicly announced a push for a state-level Voting Rights Act. Unlike the SAVE America Act, it’s designed to expand access to the ballot box by protecting against vote dilution and voter suppression.
“A State Voting Rights Act is how Louisiana decides whether we are a democracy for everyone, or only for a few,” Ashley Shelton, the president and CEO of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, said in a statement.
“At a time when federal protections are under threat, states have a responsibility to step up and protect the fundamental rights of their citizens,” she added. “Louisiana has the opportunity to lead by ensuring that every voter, especially those historically excluded, has a fair chance to participate and be represented.”
Nine states currently have their own Voting Rights Acts: Colorado (2025), Minnesota (2024), Connecticut (2023), New York (2022), Virginia (2021), Oregon (2019), Washington (2018), Illinois (2011), and California (2002).
To Patterson, embracing a wide array of voter protections is essential to expanding democratic participation — but so is remembering how the present is tied to the past.
The gaps in documentation that some lawmakers are focusing on now didn’t arise by accident, he said. Rather, they were shaped by the realities of deep-seated segregation that governed Black American life for generations.
Patterson managed to receive a birth certificate that, eight decades later, would become a quiet assurance. Many of his peers, he said, weren’t so lucky.
