The Republican Study Committee (RSC) is making its case for the SAVE Act with two of the GOP’s most election integrity-focused advocates. 

In the RSC’s latest podcast episode, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) interviewed Scott Presler, whom Roy said is someone who has “done more than just about anybody who doesn’t have elected office or frankly, maybe even more than anybody who’s elected to get us to the point right now where we’re going to have the SAVE America Act over in the United States Senate, and hopefully the Senate will be able to move the bill.”

The RSC has emerged as one of the key players on Capitol Hill in the push for the SAVE Act. The RSC hosted an election integrity roundtable last week that featured Reps. Bryan Steil (R., Wis.), Abe Hamadeh (R., Ariz.), and several others, along with Presler and Cleta Mitchel. 

During the Right to the Point episode, Presler, the founder and executive director of Early Vote Action, explained how he got involved in the election integrity movement.

“My organization was founded in response to election integrity debacles that we had in November of 2022,” he told Roy. “They ran out of paper and machines had errors. And I went ‘guys, if we don’t change the way that we vote and fight fire with the gosh darn flame thrower, well, we’re going to keep losing elections.’”

Presler burst onto the national scene when he organized a cleanup of Baltimore. He’s recently set up shop in Pennsylvania, registering tens of thousands of hunters and Christians to vote. In the Keystone State, he said, “30 percent of Christians are not registered to vote. 30 percent of hunters in Pennsylvania are not registered to vote. Why are we not courting people of faith? Why are we not at every gun show?”

“In 2024,” Presler continued, “my organization was able to register [thousands of] voters. Now, to any other person, it may seem like a lot may not, but Dave McCormick, our 53rd United States Senator now representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was elected by 15,000 voters.”

“That hard work paid off,” Roy said. “But the problem we’re now facing is, you do all the hard work, you try to register people, you try to get them out there, but then we run into fraud.”

Roy, long one of the GOP’s leading proponents of election integrity measures in the House, described the SAVE Act as a “simple bill.”

What it does, he said, is says that “all you’ve got to do is when you have a life-changing event…you go in and you say, ‘look, here’s my information for citizenship.’ You can use your passport, you can use your photo ID, you can combine it with your birth certificate. If you’re military, you can use your military ID, and then we allow states to have flexibility to allow people to sign affidavits, but they have to be on the record for it. We passed it. Five Democrats joined us. And Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate blocked it.”

“Fast forward to this Congress,” Roy continued. “We did the same act again and we passed it. And the Senate hasn’t taken it up yet. Recently, President Trump rightly said ‘voter ID is a big part of this.’ We said, ‘we agree. We have voter ID bills, but let’s put them together.’ So, we took our voter ID bill, a simple concept, attached it to the SAVE Act. And that is now the Save America Act.”

Presler further clarified that the measures he wants the Senate to pass are “not going to impact people who are currently registered. This will impact people who are going to either change their party, switch to another state, or register for a first time, and then even so, if they’ve actually read the bill, which I have, they would see that it allows discretionary use by the states to come up with their own systems, because Alaska is not California and California is not Maine. The bill is actually, I think, very reasonable.”

Roy added that his Democratic counterparts on the Rules Committee, like Rep. Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) try “to make everybody believe [voter fraud] is no big deal, that this is much ado about nothing, that there isn’t really fraud, that there really isn’t a problem.”

The problem for McGovern, Roy said, is that he had just “had Attorney General Pam Bondi in front of the House Judiciary Committee, and I asked her on the record, ‘have you all been finding fraud and prosecuting fraud?’ She said ‘absolutely.’ And the final point I made to both my Democrat colleague and to Attorney General Bondi was, even if we’re successful in arresting people and prosecuting them for fraud, we don’t unring the bell of the vote that was cast? The vote gets cast.”

The Save America Act, Roy said, acts as a “prophylactic to prevent voter fraud.” Presler pointed to the Golden State and its population exodus in recent years as another reason for common sense election integrity measures. “1.5 million people have fled California since COVID,” he said. “Did you know that in order to get off the voter rolls in the state of California, you have to send in a voter registration cancellation form mailed to the county recorder? Did you know that in Los Angeles, it says as a reason, ‘noncitizen’ as a reason to be removed? And furthermore, did you know that Rep. John Duarte lost his seat by 187 votes and that Michelle Steel lost her election by 653 votes?”

“If we had election integrity, we would have even a much different Congress than we have today,” Presler said.