Donald Trump has vowed that he will not sign any other legislation until Republicans’ massive voting bill, the Save America act, is passed. The bill would upend voting for all Americans in the middle of a federal midterm election year and create costly, chaotic changes for elections workers.
The Senate is set to consider the legislation next week, though Senate leaders say they don’t have the votes to get over the filibuster hurdle, essentially dooming the bill for failure.
While the fate of the legislation remains unclear, the damage may already be done. If it doesn’t pass, the talking points surrounding it will play into false election narratives for Trump and his allies, giving fodder for ongoing conspiracies about stolen elections.
The Save America act is a rebranded and expanded version of last year’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, which passed in the US House but didn’t get a vote in the Senate. This year’s version includes expansive documentary proof of citizenship requirements and criminal liability for election officials from the initial Save act, in addition to a very strict voter ID requirement for casting a ballot and a provision that requires states to regularly turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security.
Every voter would be affected by the Save America act, said Xavier Persad, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, “regardless of political affiliation, all across the country”. It could disenfranchise potentially tens of millions of valid US voters, he said, as people would face more barriers to voting at every step of the process.
“It is a sweeping effort to solve a problem that doesn’t exist that would require a vast, expensive new bureaucracy to be built in a short few months before a major election,” said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Changing the rules in the middle of the midterms, with primary elections already passed or underway in many states, would cause “absolute chaos”, said Gréta Bedekovics, director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this would disenfranchise people,” she said.
Here’s what the bill includes, and its prospects for passage.
Documentary proof of citizenship
What the bill would do: When registering to vote, or changing any element of voter registration, a person would need to show proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, in person at an elections office.
How it would affect voters: A few states already have some version of a documentary proof of citizenship requirement, but most do not. Most people register to vote in other ways – via automatic registration, at a motor vehicle department, at a registration drive – not at their elections office. These requirements would effectively end voter registration drives.
These provisions would affect a voter not just once, but any time they make a change, like a new address, name or party affiliation, Persad said. Because the bill also requires purges of the voter rolls beyond what states routinely do, people could get kicked off the rolls and have to go back in and reprove themselves more frequently, he said.
Showing these documents in person would prove onerous for many. Only about half of Americans have passports. If people don’t have a copy of their birth certificate and need a new one, there’s a financial and logistical cost. People who have changed their names, including married people, may not have documents that match. Younger voters, older voters and victims of natural disasters are more likely to lack access to these documents, Persad said. In rural areas, a trek to an elections office could take hours longer than for urban voters.
“It would be extremely difficult for tens of millions of Americans to comply with that requirement,” he said.
There’s a “very good argument to be made” that the act would hurt Republicans more than Democrats, Becker said. Rates of passport ownership are lower among Republicans, older voters who skew right may have more difficulty meeting voter ID requirements, and they may be more likely to have changed their name in marriage, he said.
“I’m not even sure if Republicans want to pass this bill, in reality, because I don’t think it necessarily even benefits them politically,” Becker said.
Voter ID
What the bill would do: A voter would need to show a “valid photo identification” to vote at the polls or by mail in federal elections. For people voting by mail, it requires them to submit a copy of their ID both when they request a mailed ballot and upon its return. The bill does not accept ID cards issued by schools and colleges.
How it would affect voters: This voter ID law is the strictest regime, said Bedekovics. Of the 30-plus states with some form of voter ID requirement in place, only Ohio’s would meet this standard, she said.
In concert with the documentary proof of citizenship requirements, the Save America act is “very much like a ‘show your papers’ mandate”, Bedekovics said. The additional requirements for voting by mail would cause logistical burdens on voters and elections workers and would hinder vote-by-mail participation, she said.
Legal liability for election workers
What the bill would do: The bill says elections officials who register a voter without proper documentary proof of citizenship would be subject to criminal penalties and fines. It also opens up an avenue for private citizens to sue an elections official for registering someone without proof of citizenship, a so-called private right of action.
How it would affect voters: Legal and criminal liability are another way of going after elections officials, a frequent target for Trump and his most ardent followers who have sought to undermine elections for years, Becker said.
The private right of action could serve as another way for election deniers to pummel elections officials and overwhelm their offices, Bedekovics said.
For voters, the threat of criminal charges means elections officials are “not going to let a thing like a discrepancy between your married name and your birth name slide, or even a thing like a nickname on your driver’s license, if they could face prison time for a mistake”, Bedekovics said.
The bill’s massive changes are costly and unwieldy for elections officials to undertake, especially amid a federal election year, Persad said, and the bill would strain their offices.
Voter rolls
What the bill would do: The bill would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security regularly. The federal government has sued multiple states in a quest to access their voter rolls, which elections officials believe will lead to erroneous targeting of voters for removal.
How it would affect voters: Bedekovics describes this plan as a “federal surveillance system of voters”. DHS would likely take these state rolls and compare them to its Save service, which looks people up to assess eligibility for benefits programs based on citizenship status, then flag people for removal from the voter rolls. Citizens could erroneously be removed.
“We know that this is part and parcel of the government’s effort to create a national citizen database that beyond voting has widespread risks for our privacy and mass surveillance,” Persad said.
When would it go into effect?
The Save America act would be effective immediately upon the president signing it.
“The next day, you would have the voter registration systems that 97% of Americans use gone basically,” Bedekovics said. “It would completely change the way that people register to vote, cast their ballot. It would be chaos.”
States would have to overhaul their voter registration systems on the fly, Persad said, with the threat of criminal liability over their heads. They would need to retrain election workers and educate voters on all of the changes.
What about the other stuff Trump is saying about the bill?
Trump has at times described the Save America act well beyond what it includes, saying it has a ban on mail-in ballots and bans on transgender people participating in women’s sports and gender-affirming surgeries for minors. None of those things are currently included, but suggest Trump is lobbying for a red-meat bill for the right.
“It sounds like that is his wish list for a massive anti-voter, discriminatory bill that would harm every American,” Persad said.
Another bill, the Make Elections Great Again act, does include stricter provisions for mail voting, effectively cutting off all-mail elections that some states use. But that bill has not progressed, and some Republican lawmakers have said they don’t support curtailing mail voting, which many Republican voters use across the country.
Could it actually pass?
As of now, it looks like the bill will not make it to Trump’s desk, despite his threats.
While the House approved a version of the bill, the Senate does not have the 60 votes needed to move forward because of the filibuster rule. Conservatives who support the bill have pushed for John Thune, the Senate majority leader, to mandate a so-called “talking” filibuster, which would force Democrats to hold the floor to block the Save America act.
Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said he plans to bring the bill up for a vote next week, setting it up to fail.
Trump’s demands for the Save America act also mean it would have to go back to the House for an additional vote.
The Senate is “very unlikely to pass a version of this bill”, Becker said. “It did not get through the Senate before and frankly, sweeping election reform bills brought by one party have a history of failing, for good reason.”
If Congress wants to dictate how states run elections, which it should do only rarely, it should be bipartisan, Becker said. For comparison, when the last renewal of the voting rights act went up for a vote in 2006, it passed with no dissent in the Senate and nearly 400 votes in the House, Becker noted.
What if it doesn’t pass?
Even if the bill doesn’t pass, talking points around it will animate the midterms. Trump is likely to use his bully pulpit to falsely claim noncitizens are voting en masse in US elections, and that Democrats and some Republicans stood in his way to prevent addressing the problem through the Save America act.
The bill is another way Trump has tried to assert more control over elections, which are run by state and local officials in manners set by state and local rules. Trump has suggested that the US government should federalize elections. An executive order he issued that attempted to enact many of the Save act’s provisions has largely been blocked by the courts. In early February, he said on a podcast that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.
Voting rights advocates are concerned that he will claim election results are invalid in places that don’t require proof of citizenship, Bedekovics said. The bill relies on a false narrative of voter fraud by noncitizens, and the Save America act gives another way to revive that narrative and dispute results, Persad said.
“This is likely an attempt to sow the seeds of doubt about an election that the president appears to believe his party is going to lose,” Becker said.