The SAVE America Act could backfire bigly on MAGA
It's a half-baked attempt at election rigging.
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This weekend, the Republicans thrashed about in the Senate like rotting, mildly electrocuted trout as they attempted to pass the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act — a bill that would disenfranchise millions of Americans in the name of preventing voter fraud that doesn’t exist.
Trump has said that the bill is his top priority and that he will “not sign other Bills until this is passed.” (As this newsletter was being finalized Sunday evening, he posted on Truth Social that “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’”) He’s also made clear his motivations are purely partisan, boasting that if the bill becomes law, Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.”
As usual, for Trump, the cavalcade of lies and garbage and conspiracy theories is so chaotic that it’s difficult to know where to start with a refutation. But broadly, the bill offers antidemocratic, nonsense solutions to a nonexistent problem. And while the SAVE America Act would certainly harm voters and democracy, it’s not clear it would benefit Republicans. Much of the hesitation in the Senate is because at least some in the GOP realize that dramatically restricting the franchise in the current environment could make a likely blue wave bigger — perhaps by a lot.
Even if the SAVE America Act could backfire, though, it’s a horrible bill — and the fact Trump is happily huffing his own tsunami of filth to such an extent that he can’t even minimally parse fairly obvious electoral incentives is a grim. His utter loathing for democracy, truth, and even logic — and continued Republican support for same — is a ominous sign for the country and world.
Big lie upon big liess
The SAVE America Act is rooted in Trump’s longstanding belief that anyone who votes against him must be un-American and illegitimate.
Even when he won the 2016 election, Trump claimed he would have also won the popular vote too except that three to five million undocumented people voted against him illegally. (They did not; he was lying.) And of course, Trump continues to claim that he only lost the 2020 election because of fraud. (This is also a flagrant and dangerous lie.)
In order to address and compound these falsehoods and conspiracy theories, the SAVE America Act puts in place numerous draconian provisions to supposedly prevent voter fraud, but actually to radically restrict the franchise. Among them:
— Requiring a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, which could in itself disenfranchise 21 million people and would probably upend online registration in many states.
— Requiring people to show a narrow range of photo ID at the polls, ruling out student IDs and many tribal IDs.
— Requiring voters who vote by mail to submit a photocopy of their ID.
— Requiring states to substantially ramp up their use of the Systematic Alien Verification of Eligibility system to identify potential noncitizens.
— Establishing criminal penalties for election officials who mistakenly register an applicant to vote, creating massive perverse incentives to disenfranchise people first and ask questions later.
The bill provides no funding to help states transition their systems to deal with the new rules, nor does it provide a phase in timeline, since the whole point from Trump’s perspective is to disenfranchise Democratic voters ahead of the midterms.
Are you sure this is a good idea?
But will the law actually disenfranchise more Democrats than Republicans?
Given the chaotic nature of the provisions and of likely implementation, it’s hard to answer that question. The confusion in itself might give Trump and the GOP opportunities to cheat. But even so, most analysts aren’t convinced the law would redound to Trump’s benefit.
Data journalist G. Elliott Morris points out that based on data of who holds US passports, group disproportionately affected by the SAVE America Act include those with lower incomes, those who are not college educated, older people … and Trump voters. A report for the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement suggested that results might vary widely by state. In Georgia, Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely not to have access to proof of citizenship, while in Texas, more than twice as many Republicans lack the needed documents as Democrats.
Or, in other words, the SAVE America Act seems, bizarrely, designed to elect James Talarico to the US Senate.
Other aspects of the bill also seem perversely targeted at disenfranchising Trump’s base. The bill would force women who have married and changed their names to take additional steps to register to vote to reconcile the name on their birth certificate with the name on their passport. Women tend to lean Democratic (51 to 44 percent in an April 2024 Pew survey). But married women lean Republican (50 to 45 percent). More, it seems likely that Democratic married women are more likely to not change their names at marriage.
Most difficult to predict, though, and potentially most devastating for the GOP, is enthusiasm. In the past, Republican voters tended to be wealthier, more educated, and more likely to vote — which is what made voter disenfranchisement efforts attractive from their perspective. But in the Trump era, more educated voters have been rushing to the Democrats in droves. That’s part of the reason why Democrats have done so well in midterms, even when Biden was in office.
This trend has been hypercharged in Trump’s second term, where Democrats have overperformed in special elections by an average of 13 percent compared to 2024. Democrats also are 14 points more enthusiastic about voting, according to a Washington Post survey.
We know, in other words, that when the electorate is much smaller in specials and off cycle elections, Democrats have put up impressive numbers. We also know that Democrats are much more eager to vote — which means that they are more likely to jump through hoops like photocopying Ian D to send with mail ballots or finding birth certificates or getting passports. Chaotically implementing new voting restrictions at a time when your base is demoralized and your cult leader isn’t on the ballot is a recipe for electoral disaster.
A frivolous and grotesque debate
The House GOP passed the SAVE America Act back in April 2025. But some Republicans do appear to have noticed that the law would probably not be great for them.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who opposes the bill, pointed out that in her home state of Alaska, the provisions forcing people to register in person would be incredibly burdensome, forcing some voters to actually fly to sites to register. Utah’s Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson similarly said that the SAVE America Act would be expensive and would disenfranchise Utah voters. Neither Murkowski or Henderson said so outright, but the not-very-sub subtext is that many of those disenfranchised voters, and perhaps even most of those disenfranchised voters, would be Republicans.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is probably also aware that the bill could devastate GOP electoral chances. That’s why he’s slow walked it for almost a year. It’s also why he’s rebuffed Trump’s demand to abolish the filibuster, and even refused to force a talking filibuster (which would do nothing but give Democrats a lot of time to denounce voter disenfranchisement).
Meanwhile, others in the GOP have pushed ahead, even though House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t name a single example of fraud that the law would stop.
Sen. Mike Lee claimed that passing the SAVE America Act would allow Republicans to retain the Senate in defiance of the dastardly Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — a nakedly partisan call for cheating.
Sen. Katie Britt attempted to argue that the ID requirements were reasonable by offering a big smile and a heap of lies, saying “you can’t go to work, you can’t shovel snow in New York City without an ID.” Sen. Dave McCormick did Britt one better and insisted that “you have to have an ID to have a child.” (He did not explain exactly how you prevent pregnant women from delivering their babies if they don’t have their ID on them.)
Not to be outdone by his sycophants in lowering the tone of the debate, Trump has also repeatedly called on Republicans to add unrelated trans bigotry to the SAVE America Act, urging them to ban trans women from sports and to ban gender affirming surgery for children (which he refers to as “MUTILIZATION”). Republicans dutifully tried to ban trans women from sports in an amendment during debate on the bill; Democrats blocked it.
Why are Republicans going along with this farce? Some GOP officeholders may believe Trump’s lies — no one has ever accused Mike Lee of being a genius. Others may simply hope that they can use his conspiracy theory nonsense to grandstand and get their faces on Fox News and Newsmax. Whether the motivation is ignorance or self-aggrandizement, though, the defenders of the bill are all, each and every one of them, disgracing themselves, their office, their party, and their country.
Waging war on elections
The SAVE America Act is not going to pass because there are at least a fair number of Republicans who know that if it did it might well disenfranchise huge numbers of their own voters. Nonetheless, having Trump and Mike Johnson and Katie Britt and Dave McCormick and Republican-aligned media indulging in (yet another) orgy of lies and conspiracy theories designed to delegitimize our democracy and electoral system is extremely bad, to put it mildly.
At best, the debate about the bill will further and needlessly erode trust in elections, especially among Republicans. At worst, Trump himself will cynically use its failure to claim he needs to put armed ICE agents at the polls or to deny election results.
When democratically elected officials refuse to defend democracy, when they celebrate the prospect of winning not by gaining more votes, but by disenfranchising more voters, democracy is in great danger. The SAVE America Act push has demonstrated once again that Trump hates democracy. It shows that most Republicans will not vocally defy him, even when the voters he’s targeting are their own.
The fact that the GOP is unwilling to immolate their electoral prospects on the strength of Trump’s conspiracy theories is cold comfort when the vast majority of them are unwilling to tell their voters the truth or to defend the Constitution they have sworn to uphold. The SAVE America Act is not going to destroy American democracy. But that doesn’t change that fact that our democracy is already in tatters.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Thank you, Mr. Berlatsky.
"This weekend, the Republicans thrashed about in the Senate like rotting, mildly electrocuted trout as they attempted to pass the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act — a bill that would disenfranchise millions of Americans in the name of preventing voter fraud that doesn’t exist"
This description is perfect encapsulation of this bill and bravo for highlighting up front that the "fraud" Republicans are addressing does not exist. Also, congratulations to the reporter who asked Mike Johnson to provide one example.