Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), author of the SAVE Act — a bill that would bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, something which is already illegal — appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room and claimed he drafted the bill in collaboration with election deniers and Project 2025 allies. The House of Representatives is reportedly considering attaching the SAVE Act to a continuing resolution to fund the government, an effort that is unlikely to succeed. 

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and exceedingly rare. Civil rights groups have condemned the SAVE Act as “both unnecessary and dangerous”, saying the bill “seeks to intimidate members of immigrant communities and communities from exercising their lawful right to vote.”

“I drafted that bill in the spring alongside our good friends Stephen Miller, our good friends Hans Von Spakovsky, Cleta Mitchell, other good friends of President Trump and patriots across the country who have been fighting for election integrity for years,” he told guest host and former Trump staffer Kash Patel.

Miller, Von Spakovsky, and Mitchell are all directly tied to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing initiative led by the Heritage Foundation that would provide policy and personnel to the next Republican administration.

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is one of Trump’s longest serving advisers and speechwriters. He was behind some of the administration’s most notorious policies, including the so-called Muslim ban and family separation policy. After Trump’s defeat, Miller launched America First Legal, a legal nonprofit attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as part of the conservative culture wars.

Miller was directly involved in Project 2025 before recently attempting to distance himself. America First Legal was a member of the advisory board, and Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video for its Presidential Administration Academy, an effort to recruit MAGA activists into government service, which was posted in September 2023.

Miller, an anti-immigrant extremist, has been a longtime proponent of the myth of noncitizen voting. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Miller pushed Trump’s fake electors scheme. In a December 2020 appearance on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, he said, “We have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election.”

Hans Von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 author, who The Guardian has described as having “decades-long career,” going back to the 2000 presidential contest, promoting “unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud.” According to ProPublica, von Spakovsky “is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.” 

During the 2000 election, he advised a group that was advocating for purging voter rolls and honored a company “responsible for erroneously scrubbing thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls.” In 2008, von Spakovsky withdrew from consideration from an appointment to the Federal Elections Commission under President George W. Bush after Democrats refused to bring up his nomination for a vote due to his controversial and politicized views on election administration. According to The Guardian, several former colleagues at the Justice Department objected to his nomination, claiming he “played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process”.

Von Spakovsky wrote the chapter on the Federal Election Commission in the Project 2025 policy book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and has frequently appeared in the media to promote the project. He also has promoted the SAVE Act on War Room, claiming the Democrats’ answer that non-citizens voting is already a felony is a weak position by sarcastically saying, “I guess that means all our federal prisons must be empty because fear of the law is keeping all these criminals and other people from violating the law.”

Cleta Mitchell

Cleta Mitchell is a prominent election denier and contributor to Mandate for Leadership. She was previously a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, and has been described as one of two “legal architects” of Trump’s “failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” She is also the founder of the Election Integrity Network and a senior legal fellow at Conservative Partnership Institute. The Conservative Partnership Institute is a  Project 2025 partner organization, and Election Integrity Network was originally founded as a project of CPI.

• According to The Intercept, Mitchell “played a central role” in Trump’s attempt to block Georgia’ certification of the 2020 presidential election.
• Mitchell was reportedly responsible for recruiting discredited lawyer John Eastman to Trump’s campaign in August 2020. Eastman went on to draft the memo that created the predicate for Trump to contest the election in the House of Representatives on January 6, 2021.
• She also reportedly “helped funnel money to groups working on the partisan Arizona ballot review that Trump and his allies have twisted to advance their false narrative” about voter fraud.
• On a February 2024 appearance on a right-wing radio program, Mitchell said Democrats want to garner votes in the presidential election through undocumented people voting, baselessly claiming it is “one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country.”

The SAVE Act passed the House in July 2024. President Joe Biden has promised to veto the bill.