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?
