What’s inside the one bill Trump most desperately wants to become law
What’s inside the one bill Trump most desperately wants to become law
President Donald Trump has been on a single-minded, months-long quest to try and get one particular bill — the SAVE America Act — through Congress.
It’s a bill that would transform voting registration and ballot-casting across the country by creating strict nationwide requirements to prove citizenship when registering, to show photo ID when voting, and to include photocopies of ID for voting by mail.
And Trump’s obsession with getting it passed has swallowed up practically everything the GOP-controlled Congress has tried to do this year.
He’s said he won’t sign other bills — a bipartisan housing bill, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization — until SAVE America gets passed. He’s heaped pressure on GOP Senate leaders to eliminate the chamber’s filibuster, so SAVE America could advance with a simple majority (rather than needing 60 votes, since Republicans only have 53). He’s tried to slip it into this year’s “budget reconciliation” bill, which can’t be filibustered; when the Senate parliamentarian ruled he couldn’t, he demanded her firing.
Some Republicans claim that the bill is merely a simple, commonsense effort to close loopholes in the voter system that bad actors could take advantage of — to ensure that only citizens are actually voting and that the people showing up to vote are who they say they are.
But the intensity of its support on the MAGA right goes well beyond that: The bill’s strongest supporters — including the president and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — are those who advance the false conspiracy theory that Democrats rig elections through unauthorized immigrants illegally voting, bogus mail ballots, and other malfeasance. They claim they’re so desperate to pass it to stop this outrageous electoral theft.
Election experts point out there’s no real evidence that non-citizen voting is a serious problem. “All the evidence is that very few non-citizens get on the rolls, almost all those cases are accidental — and even among the people who get on the rolls, tiny percentages of them vote,” says Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
Progressives argue that, in practice, these strict requirements would make it much harder for many citizens to register, vote, and have their votes counted. Indeed, they say, that’s probably Trump’s true goal: to suppress Democrats’ voters and make it easier for the GOP to win — or to outright steal elections like he tried to do in 2020. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has said the bill would be “Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.”
“It’s about voter suppression: putting Trump’s DHS in charge of who stays on the rolls, purging eligible voters, and blocking millions from registering,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in March, adding, “That’s not democracy, that’s election rigging.”
What would the SAVE America Act actually do if passed? Would it fulfill liberals’ worst fears — and Trump’s heart’s desire? Or would things not change as much as either side expects?
What’s in the SAVE America Act
There have been various versions of the bill since it was first introduced in 2024. (It was initially called just the SAVE Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. This year, Trump decided to rebrand it as the SAVE America act, even though that makes little sense with the acronym.)
But the core has remained consistent: strict new requirements for proving citizenship when registering to vote and proving identity when voting (including by mail). These would entail:
- Proof of citizenship for voter registration (or for updating registration): Currently, most states do not require proof of citizenship for registration, so this would be a major change. Proving citizenship is not as easy as showing a driver’s license. Instead, it can be done by presenting a passport. Alternatively, a voter could show either a birth certificate or naturalization papers in addition to a government-issued photo ID (like a driver’s license).
- Strict photo ID requirements to vote in person: States vary on whether they require voters to show ID at all and on which sorts of IDs are accepted. The bill’s requirements would be stricter than those of most states; it would notably exclude student IDs from state universities (which some states currently accept). An earlier version of the bill would have required proof of citizenship for voting (not just registration), but this was dropped in the House-passed version.
- Mail voters would have to provide photo ID or identifying information: Typically, states with widespread mail voting send ballots to voters’ addresses and accept returned ballots with a signed affidavit. The House-passed bill says that the voter should submit a photocopy of their ID, as well — or, if they can’t obtain one, they can sign an affidavit and provide the last four digits of their Social Security number. Trump has repeatedly said he wants the bill to go further and ban almost all mail voting (except for special exceptions such as military service).
The bill would also require states — and empower the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security — to try and purge any non-citizens from the voter rolls. Basically, states would have to run every registered name through DHS, so DHS can flag purported non-citizens for removal (though voters would then have a chance to contest this decision). It also would impose criminal penalties on state election officials who register someone lacking documentary proof of citizenship.
On top of all that, Trump wants to jazz the bill up by playing his culture war hits: banning trans women from women’s sports and banning gender reassignment surgery for minors. (He calls this the “full version” of the bill.) But these were not included in the version of the bill that passed the House earlier in February.
Since its House passage, the bill has been stuck in the Senate for months, held up by the perennial problem for a narrow Senate majority: the filibuster. The GOP’s 53 senators aren’t close to the 60 necessary to advance the bill, and several of them are refusing to support a “nuclear option” rules change that would ram it through anyway. So, despite Trump jawboning and threatening Senate Republicans for months, the bill hasn’t moved forward.
Why does Trump want this bill so badly — and what would its impact actually be?
For years, Trump has claimed that elections he or his party loses were somehow rigged or stolen. Even in his first presidential victory, where he won the Electoral College, he maintained that he should have won the popular vote, as well, and only failed to do so because of millions of unauthorized immigrants voting illegally. And he justified his attempt to stay in power after losing in 2020 with various false claims that Democrats stole the election for Joe Biden. There has long been a debate about whether Trump truly believes this, was opportunistically lying, or was adopting beliefs convenient to him.
But the claim that Democrats and “illegals” regularly rig elections in cities and blue states had been common on the right long before Trump entered politics. Indeed, the GOP’s push for state voter ID laws — and the Democrats’ argument that such laws are, in fact, partisan plots meant to disenfranchise young and nonwhite voters who’d be less likely to have such IDs — goes back decades.
In an earlier era of American history, rigging and ballot-stuffing by party machines was known to happen. But in recent decades, there’s been no evidence of large-scale rigging of the sort that Republicans allege (though there have been certain cases of organized fraud in local races and in a rural North Carolina congressional race in 2018).
Many Democrats and advocacy groups fear instead that the bill would be a disaster for voting rights — that its strict requirements would, in practice, inevitably lead to many legitimate voters being wrongly blocked from voting. There are darker fears, too, about the centralization of authority to review voter rolls with Trump’s DHS and whether all this would be a prelude to Trump trying to steal another election.
Partisans and their allied advocates have long hyped up the effects of voter ID laws as being great for Republicans and horrible for Democrats (and widespread mail-in voting as having the reverse partisan impact). But Republicans have frequently managed to implement voter ID requirements at the state level, and nonpartisan experts and studies have often found much less dramatic partisan impacts in practice from that and from different vote-by-mail rules. Voters, campaigns, and parties can adjust to new rules.
Polls consistently show that voter ID requirements are overwhelmingly popular, and Democrats’ reluctance to support it does put them on the wrong side of public opinion. Indeed, considering that — and considering the Trump-era re-sorting of the parties’ coalitions, in which upscale, educated voters more likely to have an ID handy have moved toward Democrats — some in the party have quietly questioned whether these bills would really hurt them so much.
Still, the SAVE America Act would be voter ID on steroids, beyond what has been implemented in states. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that more than 20 million eligible voters lack easy access to a passport or a birth certificate. However, those people wouldn’t all be disenfranchised overnight, since the proof-of-citizen requirements are for new registrants or for those updating registrations (due to, say, moving or a name change).
Stewart, the director of the MIT election lab, said that evidence from Arizona — which now requires citizenship proof for state and local elections — suggests young people newly registering have the toughest time. So, if the SAVE America Act were implemented he said, “there’s a good chance that a nontrivial number of 18 to 22 year olds would be cut out of the upcoming election.”
At the very least, there’d certainly be a chaotic adjustment period, as many of the bill’s requirements would go into effect immediately, without any funding to help states implement them.
And, of course, there are very valid reasons to distrust what the Trump administration might get up to if they gain more power over voter rolls, given their prosecutions of political enemies, the involvement of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in investigating Georgia ballots and, of course, Trump’s conduct in 2020.
For now, the bill remains stuck in the Senate. But the issue isn’t going away. Trump has been increasingly frustrated with Majority Leader John Thune’s inability to get the bill through, and a right-wing challenger could use the issue to contest Thune’s leadership after the midterms.
And whether the bill ever passes or not, the false claims of large-scale non-citizen voting — and elections being rigged against the GOP — are central to the party’s mythology in the age of MAGA. The SAVE America Act will remain as the bill that Trump and the right claim could have stopped all that — if only it had been passed.
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