EDITORIAL: Save voting from a bad law

Scary scenario: Wisconsin election officials required by law, under the threat of criminal penalties, to submit state voter rolls to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for analysis and purging of voters determined to be ineligible by DHS standards. Personal information for every registered voter in the hands of an agency that is notorious for incompetence and is being investigated for fraud.

That is just a threat at the moment, but President Trump is pushing to make it a grim reality in which citizens’ personal information is vulnerable to careless handling, as it was when members of the DOGE federal-worker firing squad copied Social Security data, or voting information is manipulated to influence the outcome of elections. 

Giving the DHS control over the voter lists of all 50 states is a clearly unacceptable requirement of the SAVE America Act, but it is not the worst provision of the bill that the president says is intended to “nationalize voting.” Even more dangerous are complicated voter identification requirements that threaten to disenfranchise many American voters, including those who are properly registered to vote.

The bill would require everyone registering to vote to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in person at election offices by producing a birth certificate, passport, REAL ID driver’s license or military ID. 

Forty-five states, including Wisconsin, do not issue driver’s licenses that show citizenship status. Roughly half of the all Americans do not have passports. An estimated 10% of all eligible voters do not have ready access to any of the documents that would be required to prove citizenship, according to the Brennan Center of Justice. The birth certificates of married women who have taken their husband’s surname would likely not be acceptable identification under the SAVE Act. 

Registered voters, even those who have dutifully showed up at polling places year after year to exercise their democratic right, could be removed from voter lists by order of the DHS if citizenship had not been previously documented. States would be required to purge voting lists every 30 days. Voters who lost their eligibility would have to reregister in person and present the required documents.

The bill would make voting more difficult or impossible for the 30% of American voters who vote by mail with its mandate that a copy of the required forms of identification be submitted every time a mail-in ballot is requested and when the completed ballot is returned to election officials. 

According to the federal Election Assistance Commission, 47 million Americans vote by mail. It is reasonable to assume that many of them do not have the means to comply with the copied-document requirement.

The bill was narrowly approved by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and is now being debated in the Senate. Democrats can block it by filibuster, but Trump is demanding that Republicans use their majority to circumvent that longstanding Senate rule.

A number of Republican senators are reported to be resisting that demand out of reluctance to pass a law that would make voting difficult for the residents of their states who voted them into office. Surveys have shown more Republican-leaning voters vote by mail than those who favor Democrats.

For Trump, it is all about the 2020 presidential election and vindicating his universally disproven claims that his loss was caused by voter fraud. He had the SAVE bill drawn up on the premise that he lost the election because his opponent’s campaign had somehow organized “millions” of undocumented immigrants to fool state election officials and vote illegally.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in American elections. Every state requires proof of identity and residency. The notion that an army of aliens stole Trump’s election victory is such an outlandish justification for a new federal law that it supports the conclusion that the SAVE Act is an attempt to assert political influence over voting rather than a solution to a noncitizen voting problem that does not exist.

The burden of this misbegotten legislation would be borne not by undocumented immigrants, but by Americans who are native-born or naturalized citizens and members of the solid corps of citizens who value and regularly exercise their right to vote. 

That right would be subject to being voided by a federal agency led by appointees of a president who recently wrote on his Truth Social website: “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen and a Laughingstock all over the World.”