Why the Senate Is Debating a Doomed Elections Bill

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago. Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things. Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month. The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed. None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland Security—until Congress puts the elections bill on his desk. The proposal’s leading champion, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, has posted on X about little else for months, and he warned that GOP senators who don’t try to outlast Democratic attempts to filibuster the legislation should lose their seat. (Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointedly brushed back this threat.) The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail. The White House told us in a statement that the legislation is “commonsense” and pointed to polling showing high support for voter identification. “This has always been a top priority for President Trump,” the spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Our elections should be treated with the utmost security.” Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.” [Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations] Trump has said plainly that he wants to “nationalize” elections that by constitutional design are run by the states. A year ago, he issued an executive order— portions of which a federal court blocked from being implemented—that directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration and sought to compel states to hand over voter rolls to DHS. The FBI has seized materials from the 2020 election in Georgia, federal investigations into that contest are under way in Arizona, and state election officials are alarmed by requests to coordinate their activities with federal agencies whose staff now include election deniers. Given the bill’s dim prospects, we asked Chandler how seriously her group is taking the legislation. “We’re taking it seriously for what it is,” she replied, “which is not necessarily just an effort to pass a bill.” If and when the SAVE America Act is defeated, voting-rights advocates don’t expect that Trump will be deterred. Rather, they predict that he will escalate attempts to interfere with the midterm elections. But their fears would become far more acute were the bill to somehow pass. Its requirement for people to prove citizenship in person when registering to vote would cut off the mail- and online-registration options now available in many states. (Trump has pushed the Senate to go even further to limit mail and early voting, both of which are popular options with voters of all political affiliations.) More than 21 million people lack “ready access” to the documents that the bill would require Americans to provide—a passport, a birth certificate, a military ID, or a driver’s licence compliant with the Real ID program, according to Michael Waldman of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. New Hampshire passed a similar law in 2024, and voting groups cited reports that hundreds of people were turned away at the polls during municipal elections last year due to lack of proper documentation. Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the bill would disproportionately affect the approximately eight in 10 married women who change their name. “We just haven’t seen anything on the scale where nearly 70 million women, in one fell swoop, could be challenged and have real barriers to being able to access the ballot,” she said. Both Trump and the bill’s Democratic critics have characterized the proposal as an overt attempt to swing future elections in the GOP’s favor. But the actual impact the SAVE America Act would have on voting is hard to predict. In a shift from the Obama era, Republican candidates now rely more on their ability to register and turn out less frequent voters, and they have made gains among young and nonwhite voters, who election experts say would face the biggest hurdles if the bill were enacted. And Trump narrowly carried married women in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, exit polls showed. Democrats and some nonpartisan voting advocates have in recent years grown more open to the idea of a national voter-ID law; they considered a proposal from then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia when they desperately needed his support for a broader package to expand voting access. “Democrats support commonsense voter-ID proposals,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. “But the SAVE Act is not a voter-ID bill. It’s a voter-suppression bill.” [Read: The last MAGA prisoner] With primaries already under way for this fall’s elections, the effort to implement the changes, should the bill pass, could result in chaos, election experts told us. Many election offices—especially those in rural America—lack the staff, funding, and technology to carry out such a significant mandate, they said. (In Washington State, the bill could cost at least $35 million to implement this year, according to estimates from Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. The National Association of Counties pegs the nationwide cost to administer changes at $510 million each election cycle.) Election workers already face enormous strain, and many jurisdictions are struggling to retain and recruit enough people to staff the polls. The SAVE America Act would only exacerbate those challenges, advocates told us, because it could expose election workers who erroneously register people without proper citizenship records to criminal penalties. Under the bill, states would have to give voter lists to DHS to run against citizenship data. Already, dozens of states have refused to provide full voter lists to the federal government as part of its efforts to collect the information. (At least 12 states have either complied or said that they will, according to the Brennan Center. The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states for the information, and three federal courts have ruled this year that the federal government has no right to the data.) Some Republican secretaries of state view the debate as an unserious attempt to create policy, election experts who have spoken with them told us. (Several GOP secretaries of state we contacted didn’t want to talk about the legislation; one spokesperson described it to us as a “hypothetical” proposal unworthy of his boss’s time.) Should the bill pass, they figure, the courts will block it—at minimum because of a legal theory that courts should not allow rules to be changed so close to an election, because it could lead to confusion among voters and poll workers. They also argue that state and local election officials already routinely kick ineligible people off of voter rolls and that some states are taking on more restrictive proof-of-citizenship requirements on their own. Proof-of-citizenship bills have been signed by the South Dakota governor and passed by legislatures in Utah and Florida. [Read: Trump’s favorite voter-ID bill would probably backfire] Derek Monson, the executive director of the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, said the centralization of election authority and processes, as well as of citizenship information and voter data, in the hands of the federal government could make voter fraud easier to commit. “What we’ve done is simplified the act of voter fraud for people who want to commit it,” he said. He laid out a scenario in which a clearinghouse of voting data maintained by fewer people at the federal level (as opposed to more people across all 50 states) is accessed by bad actors. “It seems like every other week some federal agency is being hacked,” he added. “Now you’ve just gift-wrapped everyone’s personal voter data for a hacker to get.” The SAVE America Act’s biggest supporters wave off these concerns. To the many Trump fans who have come to share his unfounded grievances about the 2020 elections, the Senate’s debate represents a moment of validation—win or lose. It “is a sea change from 2020,” Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn his defeat that year, told us. As for the bill’s long-shot chances, she said: “You can’t win if you don’t try.”