The Latest Republican Efforts to Make It Harder to Vote in the Midterms
A couple of years ago, when my mother was ninety-six, I drove her to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to get a photo I.D. She no longer had a valid driver’s license or passport, and it seemed prudent for her to have some sort of visual documentation aside from her Costco card to verify that she was who she said she was. Though she had recently moved from Virginia to the bluest of blue—“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern”—states, I told her that it was possible that sometime in the near future she might need a photo I.D. to vote. That got her attention. If democracy were a religion, the polling place would be her church. Even the hint that she might not be allowed to vote motivated her to dig through her files until she found her birth certificate. It was the original, issued in 1928.
We navigated the department’s website to schedule an appointment, which turned out to be on an insanely hot day in September. When we arrived, we picked our way across the packed and potholed parking lot—my mother uses a walker—until we stood at the bottom of a ramp outside the building that was pitched at an ungodly steep angle. It took my mother pushing the walker and me pulling it to get her to the door. (I mention all this only to demonstrate that it can be a struggle for many people just to get to their D.M.V.)
Not surprisingly, the office was crowded with an assortment of hot and cranky people. (I would put us in this category.) But my mother had an appointment, so I assumed that she wouldn’t have to wait too long. This, as you already know, was a naïve assumption. We took a number and waited and then waited some more. Eventually, my mother wanted to leave. I believe the words she used were “this is stupid.” I reminded her why we were there, and she pointed out that she voted by mail, which didn’t require an I.D. It was in the middle of this argument when her number was called.
At the counter, my mother handed over her rent bill to prove that she was a Massachusetts resident and then carefully unfolded her birth certificate—the paper was yellowed and fragile—and slid it proudly across to the clerk. “It’s the original,” she said, and, when the clerk did not respond, she added, “from 1928.” The clerk said that she had to talk to a supervisor. When she came back, she told us that the document was unacceptable. “It’s missing a file number,” she said. “What’s a file number?” I asked. I was not trying to be smart. Not to worry—clearly the clerk thought I was a dimwit. “It’s a number on the birth certificate, for filing,” she said. “Maybe nearly a hundred years ago New York City hospitals didn’t have file numbers,” I said. The clerk shrugged. “You can come back when you have a file number,” she said, and that was that.
In the years since, I have thought about that day each time Republicans in Congress have pushed forward the deceptively named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. They did so in 2024, 2025, and most recently last month, when its newest iteration, the SAVE America Act, passed the House on nearly purely partisan lines, with only one Democrat—Henry Cuellar, of Texas—crossing the aisle. It now goes to the Senate, where Susan Collins, of Maine, has pledged to be the fiftieth Republican to support it. This means that if the Republicans can figure out a way to get around the sixty-vote threshold necessary to bring the bill to a vote—by, say, eliminating the filibuster—Vice-President J. D. Vance would vote to break the tie, President Donald Trump would sign it, and the SAVE America Act would become law. On Sunday, Trump threatened to veto all legislation coming across his desk until the SAVE America Act was passed, writing on Truth Social, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION—GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY—ILLNESS, DISABILITY.”
Threats aside, there may be other ways of pushing through the kinds of provisions in the SAVE America Act, such as bypassing Congress altogether. A year ago, President Trump issued an executive order, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which required proof of citizenship to register to vote and decimated voting by mail. That order was struck down in a summary judgment last October, but a draft for a new order goes even further. That draft has been disseminated by a group of Trump supporters who continue to claim interference in the 2020 election, including Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who has known Trump since high school. According to the Washington Post, they “expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.”
The draft calls for Trump to take control of elections from the states immediately, superseding their constitutionally derived authority, by declaring a national emergency based on a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. (The Post notes that an intelligence review found that China considered “efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.”) “Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that. But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin told the Post. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” The draft order would require all voters to re-register for the 2026 midterms, with proof of citizenship in hand.
On February 27th, Trump told a reporter for PBS that he had “never heard about” the draft. Yet, in a Truth Social post two weeks earlier, he wrote, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections whether approved by Congress or not!”
Disenfranchising voters who seem likely to vote for the other party has been a long-standing Republican project. Under Trump, that effort—including his call on Dan Bongino’s podcast for the Republicans to “nationalize the voting”—has focussed on another claim, that non-citizens are engaging in voter fraud. Susan Collins justified her support of the SAVE America Act by claiming that “there have been some incidents recently where people have called up town clerks and saying, ‘How do I get a friend of mine who’s from another country to vote here?’ And we’re not hearing a clear answer that only American citizens can vote in American elections.” But, as NPR recently reported, “Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.”
This reality has not dampened Republicans’ zeal for ginning up the spectre of “illegal aliens,” as the President calls them, infiltrating and corrupting the democratic process. An even more restrictive bill, introduced by the Republican representative Bryan Steil, of Wisconsin, which is currently pending in the House, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued I.D. to cast a ballot in person. Opponents of both bills say that requiring a government I.D. is burdensome on working people, people of color, students (because school I.D.s are not acceptable), and older Americans. If that claim seems overblown, consider the experience of my mother, a citizen who has voted in every election for the past seventy-five years. It’s hard to believe that her thwarted attempt was an anomaly. And what about someone who works a nine-to-five job and is unable to get to a D.M.V. or a county clerk’s office during working hours?
Then there’s the cost. Recently, my mother and I submitted a request to the New York City records department to get a copy of her birth certificate, hoping that it would come with a file number. It cost forty-five dollars. (The first link in my Google search was to a private company charging twice that.) In fact, even that document may not be sufficient. My mother is one of sixty-nine million American women who took their husband’s name when they got married. So, even if she returns to the Pittsfield Registry with an acceptable copy of her birth certificate and a rent bill, the names on them will not match. What then? The short answer is that she will be among the millions of Americans who will be summarily disenfranchised if a proof of citizenship is required to vote.
There are other provisions in both the SAVE and the MEGA acts that make it difficult for people to vote, or for their ballots to be counted, such as invalidating mailed ballots that arrive in the days after an election, even if they are postmarked on Election Day. And the MEGA bill puts an end to most voting by mail, something that Trump has been pursuing for years. Not surprisingly, states where everyone is allowed to vote by mail, such as Colorado and Washington, tend to have some of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. If the goal is to limit the franchise, that’s a good place to start.
President Trump, in his State of the Union address in February, urged the Republicans to figure out a way to pass the SAVE America Act as he railed against Democrats, saying, “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re gonna stop it.” As usual, he offered no evidence, but his claims nevertheless have consequences. Of the many ways to suppress the vote, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system may be the most insidious, because it undermines what should be our common faith in the integrity of democracy itself. ♦