The SAVE Act Explained: Why Voter ID Laws Are Failing (Illegal Immigration & Census Deep Dive)

Of the 47 nations in Europe, all 47 require government-issued photo ID to vote. India, a country where 63% of the population live in rural areas, and where hundreds of millions of people live on less than $2 a day, photo ID is still required to vote. Even in Mexico, biometric voter ID with a photo, fingerprint, and hologram have been required since 1992. And right now, in the United States of America, you need a government-issued ID to buy a beer, board a plane, open a bank account, pick up a prescription, buy cold medicine, adopt a stray cat, and rent a library book. In New York, you can't even buy whipped cream without a license. And in California, you can't buy spray paint without one. But in that same state and many others, you can walk into a polling booth, simply say a name, no ID required, and cast a vote that will decide how trillions of dollars get spent. Voter ID isn't about race or even immigration. It's about something else entirely, and I'm going to prove it. 84 84% of Americans, Republican and Democrat, support requiring an ID to vote. That is a level of bipartisan agreement that almost never exists. And yet, the Senate says the bill meant to enshrine the need for voter ID is dead on arrival. What on God's green earth would make a government say no to something 84% of the voters want? That's what we're going to be discussing right now, and the answer is going to shock you, especially if you've bought in to the distraction that this is all about race. Buckle up. If you merely say you want voter ID, people will call you racist or say you're suppressing voters. They'll say there's no need for voter ID because no one is voting illegally. That is moronic. [music] Game theory makes it clear that any system that can be exploited for advantage will be exploited. Don't believe me? Here are some stories pulled from a vast sea of such stories. A Florida mother hacked into 117 student accounts and cast 246 fraudulent votes so her daughter could become, drumroll, please, homecoming queen. Both of them were charged with felonies. A college student at Cal State installed keyloggers on campus computers, stole 750 students' passwords, and then cast over 600 fake votes to win a student council election. >> [music] >> He went to federal prison. At Berkeley High, a kid running for ASB president logged into 500 classmates' email accounts and voted for himself hundreds of times. For student government, parents have forged birth certificates and falsified residency documents so their 12-year-olds could win Little League tournaments. A man broke into an aquarium and stole a fish to win a fishing tournament. Hollywood actresses and billionaire CEOs alike bribed coaches and faked SAT scores to get their kids into college. Everyone says voter fraud won't happen, but fraud happens all the time and for things far more trivial than a national election. Now, I'm going to preempt the people who are going to say, "Well, Tom, if there was fraud, we would already see it." I'll stop that right now with the following true story. In 2013, New York City's Department of Investigation sent 63 undercover investigators to polling places to vote under the names of people who were ineligible. They were dead, moved away, or convicted felons. 61 out of the 63 succeeded. That's a 97% success rate. They didn't even try that hard. In five cases, investigators in their 20s and 30s posed as voters aged 82 to 94. One of the two who got caught was recognized by the felon's mother, who happened to be a poll worker at that location. That is our current strategy, coincidence. Additionally, it is standard procedure for ballots cast in person to not contain any identifying information about the voter. So, once a fraudulent ballot goes into the box, it is literally impossible to isolate it or trace it back. It's mixed in with every legitimate ballot and counted the same way. The bipartisan New York State Board of Elections spokesman, John Conklin, said it plainly, "It demonstrates that voter fraud is easy to commit and not easy to find. It shows that someone with a little knowledge of where the cracks are in the system can exploit them and we'd never know [music] about it." And UVA law professor, Michael Gilbert, put the logic point precisely, "The failure to observe fraud does not mean that no fraud takes place. If people commit fraud and risk prison for student council and homecoming queen and happily commit fraud by cashing the checks of dead people, what on earth makes them think people won't vote under someone else's name if ID is not required." So, let's start with the bill itself. The SAVE Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility. It does three things. One, [music] it requires documented proof of citizenship to register to vote. Two, it requires a photo ID to cast a ballot. And three, it requires states to actively maintain accurate voter rolls. That's it. That's the whole bill. Prove you're a citizen, prove you who you say you are, and states, keep your list clean. I for one am fine with the fact that I have to show ID if I want to adopt a cat or check out a library book. IDs are an easy way to limit how easily a system can be abused. Take your bank account. You walk into a bank and say, "I'd like to withdraw money from my account." And the teller is going to say, "Sure, can I see some ID?" That's not oppression. That's not suppression. That's the bank protecting you. They're making sure nobody else walks in and takes your money. Now, imagine a bank that said, "No ID needed. Just tell us your account number and we'll hand over the cash." How long do you think it would take before someone exploited that? A week? A day? It would happen so fast no one would keep their money there. Voting is the same thing, except instead of protecting however much money you have in the bank, it's protecting your vote, which influences how trillions of dollars of taxpayer money gets spent. Every fraudulent vote doesn't just add a new vote to the system, it cancels out a legitimate one. Requiring an ID is not suppression, it's the system protecting the value of your vote. The next argument you're going to hear is, "It's too hard for some people to get an ID." Let's talk about it. There are roughly 260 million adults in the United States. Available data that covers the entire adult population suggests that somewhere between 95 and 97% of Americans already have a government-issued photo ID right now in their wallets because they need it for everything. You can't buy spray paint, as I said, or even whipped cream in some places without ID. But okay, fair enough, what about the other 3 to 5%? Some are admittedly so burdened by work that any new strain is going to be tough to accommodate. But roughly 3% of adults in the US are legally categorized as having an intellectual disability. With or without ID, odds are very low that they're going to be able to navigate voting anyway. Not to mention, only roughly 60% of people turn out to vote even in a presidential election. That leaves a vanishingly small number of people that would actually be suppressed by requiring voter ID if that was even the actual intent, which of course it's not. And even if you assume a full 3% of adults would want to vote but be made unable to because they couldn't get an ID, it makes no sense to put for their vote being watered down by fraud to pick up a largely hypothetical 3%. And if people are concerned about some of the people in this very small pool that don't already have an ID being stopped from getting an ID because they can't afford one, offer everyone a free ID. It would be trivial to add a provision to the bill that requires states to provide ID free of charge. It would be trivial, but the Democrats won't even debate the bill. They're calling it Jim Crow 2.0 and promising to filibuster so that it can't even be debated or voted on. That's because this isn't about protecting voters, it's about power and exploiting the system to get it and maintain it and exploiting the system to do so. And remember India, a country with hundreds of millions of people in rural areas, widespread poverty and literacy challenges that dwarf anything in the United States? They've required a photo ID since 1993. The idea that the richest, most technologically advanced nation in the history of planet Earth can't manage what India, Mexico, and all of Europe have been doing for decades, that's not a serious argument. It's a smoke screen. Which raises the real question. If this isn't actually about people being unable to get an ID and 84% of Americans across party lines support the initiative, why is the Senate blocking it? What does someone in power gain by making sure we don't verify who's voting? We will get right back to the show in a second, but first let's talk about the tracking system built into your phone that you can't turn off. Every SIM card has a permanent ID. It's called [music] an IMSI. Your carrier assigns it once and it never changes. That ID follows you everywhere. [music] Your carrier tracks it, advertisers track it, bad actors track it. VPNs can't hide it and encrypted apps can't change it. Cape [music] solves this with identifier rotation. Your SIM ID automatically changes every 24 hours. Same phone number, new [music] identity every single day making you untraceable, but Cape doesn't stop there. Your phone number itself is protected by a 24-word cryptographic phrase. [music] Your voicemail is encrypted. 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More people in your state means more seats. More seats means more power. And it doesn't matter whether those people can vote or not. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the presence of all immigrants, legal and illegal, and their US-born minor children shifted the distribution of 26 House seats and 26 Electoral College votes in the 2020 census. Of those, 17 seats were shifted by non-citizens alone, people who cannot legally vote in a federal election, but whose mere physical presence in a state increases that state's political power in Washington. There's no conspiracy theory in that. It's not even a disputed fact. It's just how the census math works. Given how much power it conveys, can you not understand why states would want to get as many bodies in their state as possible, regardless of their legal status? In May of 2024, then Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was asked about all of this in a Senate hearing. The Commerce Department, by the way, oversees the census. So, she was the right person to ask. Senator Hagerty asked, >> Illegal aliens today are counted in the US census. Is that correct? Raimondo confirmed, >> Yes, as required by the Constitution. >> The senator continued, This total census population, which includes illegal aliens, is then in turn used for the allocation of congressional districts and electoral votes for each state. Is that correct? >> Yes. That's the Commerce Secretary of the United States confirming on the record that people in the country illegally are counted [music] in the census, and that count directly determines how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives. Politicians don't even try to hide this fact. In a 2021 House Foreign Affairs Committee briefing, Congresswoman Yvette Clark, a Democrat from Brooklyn, said, and I quote, I I need more people in my district, but just for redistricting purposes. She wasn't caught on a hot mic. She said it publicly, on camera, in an official congressional proceeding. She was talking about absorbing Haitian migrants into her Brooklyn district, not because she had a plan to help them, but because more bodies in her district meant more political power for her. Now, think about the incentive structure this creates. If you're a politician in a state with millions of non-citizens, you have a structural reason to keep them there. Every non-citizen in your state is padding your power in Congress and in the Electoral College, regardless of whether or not they cast a vote. But, it would be even better if they could cast a vote, wouldn't it? And that's exactly why Democrats have publicly stated on the record that their plan is to find a path to citizenship for all illegal immigrants. If you don't believe me, in 2022, then Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in front of the US Capitol and said on camera, Our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers, but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here. Again, it's not a leaked memo or a slip on a hot mic. That's the most powerful Democrat in the Senate stating his ultimate goal on the record. Honestly, if you're a Democrat, it's a smart strategy if all you care about is staying in power. Data consistently shows that recent immigrants vote disproportionately for the party that welcomed them in and promised benefits. So, if even half of the 11 million immigrants become citizens and start voting, you have permanently shifted the electoral math. Not for one election, permanently. If you want an example of exactly how this plays out, look no further than California. >> [music] >> In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty agreement granting citizenship to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. Before that amnesty, California voted Republican in nine out of 10 presidential elections. After it, California has not voted Republican once. Not one single time in almost 40 years. Now, to be clear, this isn't about whether immigrants are good people. My wife is an immigrant. Like any group, most are awesome. Most of them came here for a better life, just like virtually everyone's ancestors did. This is about whether politicians are using them as pawns in a power game. And the answer, based on their own words, their own votes, and the structural incentives that are baked into the system, [music] the answer is obviously yes. That's why they won't even vote or debate on the Save Act. That's why they won't add a citizenship question to the census. That's why they call voter ID racist. The goal isn't to protect immigrants or voters. It's to protect their power. But sadly, grabbing power is a much smaller problem than what we have to discuss now. Namely, the true cost of immigration in a system with welfare. Because that toxic combo is destroying the middle class. The federal government added $2.2 trillion in debt in a single year. Total national debt now stands at roughly $38.5 trillion. And for the first time in American history, annual interest payments alone are more than a trillion dollars. And that's nearly doubled in just three fiscal years. Let me put these numbers into perspective. The federal deficit for 2025 was roughly $1.8 trillion. That means the government spent $1.8 trillion more than it collected in taxes. That gap is roughly 6% of GDP, which is more than 50% above our 50-year average. And it's not going to get better. The CBO projects deficits will exceed $2 trillion a year for the next decade. Federal debt held by the public has hit 100% of GDP and is on pace to blow past the all-time record of 106% set in 1946, right after we had just finished fighting a world war. So, how did we get here? The same way every empire before us got here. Politicians discovered that the easiest way to win elections is to promise people free things, programs, benefits, safety nets, >> [music] >> tax cuts, stimulus checks. The problem is they can never collect enough taxes to pay for all of it, so they borrow the difference. And to be clear, this is not a partisan problem. Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending. Democrats increase spending without increasing taxes enough to cover it. The result is the same on either side. The gap between what the government takes in and what it spends just keeps growing year after year, regardless of who is in power. So, don't think for a second that you're on the good side. We have got to solve this problem. Now, a crazy data point that you have to take into consideration when you're thinking through the problem of immigration, get ready for this, it actually lowers federal deficits. Sort of. Let me explain. >> [music] >> The Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan agency that does the math for Congress, estimates that the recent surge in immigration could actually reduce federal deficits by about 900 billion over the next 10 years. The reason? Immigrants pay taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, and at the federal level they continue to contribute more in revenue than they cost in benefits, even if they're using fake social security numbers. They're still paying. But here's what that number doesn't capture. At the state level and local level, the same CBO found the exact opposite. [music] Immigration imposed a net cost of billions of dollars a year because states bear the direct costs of education, housing, emergency services, shelter, and the like. The federal government gets the tax revenue, sure, but your city gets the bill. Now, here's the trillion-dollar question, literally. If immigration lowers deficits in real life and not just in statistics, could we use immigration to solve our catastrophic debt problem? Well, over the Biden presidency, we ended up running a natural experiment. And unfortunately, our deficits have soared as we've imported an unprecedented number of immigrants. That doesn't mean that immigration has caused our debt crisis. I want to be very clear about that, but it does mean it's not going to solve it. The idea of importing infinite to flip a fiscal deficit into a surplus sounds very appealing if you just extrapolate from the average positive projected fiscal effects that appear in some studies, but it ignores real-world constraints like diminishing economic returns, infrastructure limits, values collisions which nobody wants to talk about, overall social integration challenges, and the this one's rough the low versus high-skill composition of who immigrates, which matters more than anything else. While immigration can boost GDP and can reduce federal deficits in the short-term, the benefits aren't linear or unlimited. Pumping in endless numbers of immigrants invariably eventually creates net costs, backlash, and social instability. Just look at history. Immigration expands the labor supply, which grows the economy by filling jobs, increasing productivity, and raising overall output. However, beyond a certain point, it saturates markets, especially for low-skilled work, leading to sharper wage drops, higher unemployment for natives, particularly those without high school diplomas, and reduces pressure for businesses to raise wages or invest in productivity enhancing tech or training. In essence, economies aren't infinitely elastic. Adding workers does boost supply, but if demand, jobs and capital, doesn't keep pace, you get inefficiencies like underemployment or black market labor, which we see both of right now. According to both the Manhattan Institute and National Affairs, the skill level of the immigrant population matters a great deal in terms of whether they'll be an economic contributor or a net cost to the system. High-skilled immigrants, for example, college educated, generate lifetime surpluses, but low-skilled ones often create net drains that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars per person over 30 years. This is due to higher use of education, health, and welfare programs. Costs that grow exponentially as more people immigrate. Mass migration flows tend to skew low-skilled as global migration pressures come from poorer regions, amplifying the burdens. >> [music] >> We also have to confront the realities of incentives. When the richest country in the world opens its borders and promises access to infrastructure like education, health services, and welfare programs, you are going to, understandably, attract low-skilled workers who are fleeing desperate situations, and will, over time, draw more out of the system than they contribute. And none of that is even to mention what is likely the most damaging impact of mass immigration, the social, cultural, and political limits of integrating a large number of people into a society too quickly. >> [music] >> Rapid influxes of low-skilled migrants, over time, drains resources, strains social cohesion, leads to cultural clashes, reduced trust, and political backlash. We see it over and over in history. Historical waves, for example, here in the US in the 19th century. They succeeded partly because there were few, if any, social programs to draw from, so you just weren't attracting people that just wanted something on the dole, and there were built-in pauses that allowed for cultural assimilation. With our current state of unbearable debt, intolerable inequality, taxation through inflation, and already skyrocketing populism, this is a time to pause and adjust the system to focus on re-stabilizing our economy and society. It is not a time to create further vulnerabilities in areas like our voting system. Nor is it time to weaponize immigrants who are already being leveraged to gain political power by offering promises of mass citizenship and access to welfare programs. In the US, [music] a staggering number of people receive benefits from one social service or another. We're talking north of 50%. Some analyses show an even higher number depending on whether you count things like federal student loans, farm subsidies, or mortgage interest deductions as, quote unquote, government benefits. >> [music] >> But, sticking to just things like Medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and the like, you've still got over 50% of Americans already receiving some kind of assistance. Our welfare state has grown absolutely massive, and importing more people with an incentive to broaden those systems even further without first balancing the budget is economic suicide for a country that is already on life support due to debt. Given all of this, if we're hell-bent to use immigration as a deficit reduction strategy, fine, but it's going to require a selective immigration process that attracts skilled workers from around the world and restricts low-skilled immigrants. That would almost certainly be good for the economy long-term, but as discussed, right now we're doing the exact opposite. We are enticing low-skilled people from the most dysfunctional places on Earth via a massive social safety net. And in states like California, Minnesota, and New York, which build themselves literally as sanctuaries for immigrants, lawmakers are doing their best to ensure easy access to free infrastructure, such as education and health care, dramatically increasing the likelihood that arrivals are a net drain on finite resources. And again, if you don't believe me, just look up some of the things that California's Governor Newsom has said publicly. Additionally, we're doing little to nothing to maximize the number of high-skilled immigrants, who are the ones that would tend to be net contributors. Now, hopefully, all of that explains how immigration can either be a positive or a negative, depending on how a country's systems are set up, and how deficits can so quickly get out of control when things aren't set up well. But bodies, legal or otherwise, pad the census. Social safety nets attract bodies. Amnesty, paths to citizenship, and yes, fraud create votes. And as California demonstrates, when you attract people with free stuff, those people tend to vote for more free stuff. Politicians refuse to pass voter ID laws because they want a system that can be exploited, so they can leverage it to gain and [music] retain power through, among other things, bad immigration policy. It's not a conspiracy. It's a chain of incentives embedded in a system that politicians are trying to keep easy to exploit. And as game theory and reality make abundantly clear, any system that can be exploited will be exploited. The tragic irony of all of this is that even the well-intentioned people who are most passionate about equality, the ones marching, protesting, demanding the rich pay their fair share, saying that there are a sanctuary for immigrants, they are the ones voting for for very policies that make the rich richer. Every new program funded by borrowing eventually requires money printing, and every round of money printing widens the gap they're trying to close. They're going to blame capitalism, and they do, but this isn't capitalism. This is what happens when a government counterfeits its own currency and calls it policy. Every empire that has ever done what we're doing with [music] debt and money printing has collapsed. Every single one. America is not exempt from math. So, what should any of us do? First, support voter ID. Not because you hate immigrants, because you understand the incentive structure that's being protected by leaving the system unsecured. Second, stop voting for free stuff. I know this one is going to be hard to get people to listen to, but there is no free. There is only paid for by money printing, which is paid for by your purchasing power, which hurts the poor and middle class the most. Third, demand balanced budget. If we balance the budget, we don't need to print money, and if we want to allocate things in a balanced budget to immigrants, we can. We just can't do it with an unbalanced budget. If we stop printing money, inflation stabilizes. If inflation stabilizes, inequality begins to narrow. Everything, everything traces back to debt, money printing, and politicians' insatiable appetite for power. And fourth, get into assets. I wish this weren't the reality, but your government has made it impossible to save your way to prosperity. >> [music] >> Cash is a melting ice cream cone. You need to own things that rise when money is printed. Stocks, real estate, gold, silver, Bitcoin, a business, etc. Needless to say, this is not financial advice. It's just math. Remember, some people will cheat on college admissions, homecoming crowns, fishing competitions, and student elections when little to nothing is on the line. Why on earth would you think they won't cheat on national elections when there's trillions of dollars and political power on the line? 84% of Americans, Republican and Democrat, support requiring an ID to vote, but the Senate won't even debate the topic. Voter ID isn't about race. It's about power. All right, if you want to see me explore topics like this in real time, make sure you subscribe right now and join me live Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 7:00 a.m. Pacific time. I will see you there. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. AI is the most incredible technology ever invented, but the Epstein files have revealed it's also being used as a form of mind control. >> [music] >> Now, I get it that headlines