MAGA's "pasta pass" talking point is height of gaslighting
They know better. They're hoping voters don't.
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It looks like Republicans settled on a talking point about why the SAVE America Act is totally necessary to stop non-citizens from fraudulently voting by the millions and zillions — and you will not be surprised to learn that it is hilariously stupid.
Yes, it’s time to talk about the Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Pass, the latest thing that Republicans have settled on as justification for the voter ID requirements in President Trump’s signature election suppression bill.
Ground zero for this nonsense seems to have been White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson going on Newsmax last week to discuss how she saw a tweet from Olive Garden about their never-ending pasta deal and that you need ID for it, and she just got to thinking, “Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more seriously than Democrats take election security.”
Republican House members dutifully picked up and parroted this nonsense, with Rep. Steve Scalise appearing on CNBC to give his deep thoughts, Rep. David Kustoff racing to Newsmax to share the good news about pasta security, and Rep. Virginia Foxx going on the House floor to push this as a reason to vote in favor of the bill.
This isn’t new, of course — well, the pasta part is, but not Republicans alighting on some random thing they think you need ID to buy and then declaring that should mean you need one to vote.
Trump has spent several years telling people that because you need an ID to go to the grocery store, you should need an ID to vote, and he recently expanded this keen analysis: “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID.”
Of course, you do not need an ID to go to a grocery store or get gas, but you can understand Trump’s confusion given that he’s probably never done either of these things for himself.
Rep. Bryan Steil no doubt thought he’d hit on a big old gotcha by sharing, during a floor debate on the SAVE Act earlier this year, that he went to buy beer and the clerk carded him, even though she knew him and even though he is 44, so therefore we need voter ID: “I think it’s nuts that we protect our beer in this country more than our ballots in jurisdictions.”
The problem for Steil, of course, is that laws vary widely across the country as to how we “protect our beer,” just as they do for our ballots.
There are so many ways these arguments are wrongheaded that it is impossible to know where to start. But we’ll give it a shot.
There’s no constitutional right to penne
The simplest — and biggest — reason that requiring an ID to buy pasta or groceries or gas or beer, or anything really, is not the same as requiring an ID to vote is that buying pasta or groceries or gas or beer is not a sacred Constitutional right that shall not be abridged. Voting, however, is. We have, like, multiple constitutional amendments about it.
The Fifteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, extended the right to vote to Black men, though that right was largely theoretical until the modern civil rights era abolished the many strategies states used to keep Black people out of the voting booth. The Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to women. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned poll taxes — one of those many voter suppression strategies. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to 18.
The government can’t impose conditions that severely burden your right to vote. In contrast, Olive Garden is allowed to deny or abridge or entirely cancel your access to pasta.
However, in 2008, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana voter identification law as constitutional, opening the floodgates for similar laws, with 36 states now requiring some form of identification. Put another way, that ruling stands for the idea that at least some ID requirements are not too burdensome on the voter.
So with that, why can’t Trump, via the SAVE America Act, impose a nationwide voter ID requirement?
Republicans who are pushing pasta pass arguments deliberately avoid saying what types of identification are acceptable under the SAVE America Act or what the Act really does. Instead, they do everything to make it sound like as long as you have your driver’s license in your pocket — the same license you’d whip out to get unlimited pasta — you’re totally fine for voting.
Except that is very much not the case. The SAVE America Act isn’t just a voter ID law. It’s also a “documented proof of citizenship” law. The former has to do with what you bring to the polls, but the latter is much more complicated and is about how you register or re-register to vote.
The SAVE America Act does not seem to require mass re-registration, so if you are already registered and haven’t moved, you would just be subject to the photo ID requirement at the polls. But even if you already live in a state with a voter ID law, it would override what types of identification you could present at the polls.
Some states currently accept things like hunting licenses or student IDs or concealed carry permits or government employee IDs as proof of identity at the polls, along with the more typical things like driver’s licenses and passports. But under the SAVE America Act, only a driver’s license, state identification card, passport, military ID, or tribal ID would be allowed, period.
The real problem comes in at the registration stage. A huge number of people register or re-register each election period. In the two years prior to the 2020 election, 91 million people registered or updated their voter registration. In the two-year period before the 2022 midterms, 70 million did, and there’s no reason to think there wouldn’t be similar numbers for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
So let’s say you kept your driver’s license in your pocket after going to Olive Garden and decide to trundle on down to your local election office and update your registration because you moved since the last election. Were the SAVE America Act to pass, when you get there, you’ll find that your license alone doesn’t work, because your license doesn’t prove you are a citizen.
So along with your license or other government-issued photo ID, you also have to provide a citizenship document: a certified birth certificate, a record of birth extract, an adoption decree showing you were born in the United States, a consular report showing you were born abroad, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian Card.
Not only that, but your government-issued photo ID and birth certificate or similar document must match, so if you changed your name upon marriage, as 84 percent of women do, you’re out of luck. The proposed law doesn’t really say what people are supposed to do in that situation, save for vaguely leaving that bit up to the states. So, one state could decide that if you bring your license, your birth certificate, and your marriage certificate showing the name change, you’re good, and another could decide that isn’t enough to prove citizenship.
But surely if you have a Real ID, that would be fine, right? Nope. Only five states issue Real IDs that show proof of citizenship. Military ID? Only with service records showing you were born here. Valid, unexpired US passports can be used, but 149 million American citizens don’t have a passport.
Additionally, the bill would functionally eliminate most of the existing ways people can register or update their registration. Depending on the state, people can currently register or update their registration online, via mail, or in person. People also get registered via voter registration drives. The bill mentions only mail registration and explains that those who register by mail still have to bring proof of citizenship documents in person to finalize their registration. It’s likely that would also apply to online registration and registration drives. States that automatically register people to vote when they obtain driver’s licenses would be required to have election officials verify citizenship separately, which is pretty much the opposite of automatic registration.
You can quickly see what a mess this would be, not just at the start but during every election cycle. People move. They get divorced and change their name. They don’t vote in a couple of cycles and fall off the voter rolls. Every election cycle would include tens of millions of people needing to show up in person at election offices with their citizenship documents and have underfunded election staff verify their citizenship.
But your friendly local election staff are likely not secret citizenship document experts. What happens when you show up with your license and your certified birth certificate from a different state than you are currently registering in? Will all election workers have some sort of comprehensive understanding of what certified birth certificates look like in all 50 states? How about determining whether an adoption decree is real or valid or even what it is supposed to look like?
And for states that have same-day registration? Poll workers would have to verify citizenship documents on the fly in the midst of a busy election day. Poll workers, however, are not generally full-time election officials, but rather people hired just for the election itself. In Minnesota, which is a same-day registration state, it takes 30,000 election judges for each election.
The hassle is the point
What the SAVE America Act won’t do is solve the problem of noncitizen voting, because that is not really a thing. Study after study after study shows it is vanishingly rare. Even the Heritage Project database of “election fraud,” which pretty much exists to get bills like SAVE passed, only shows 100 instances of non-citizens voting — no, not per year, or even per election. One hundred total instances in the last 25 years. There’s no problem to be fixed.
What the SAVE America Act actually would accomplish is deterring eligible voters, as we saw when Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011 and, when it went into effect in 2013, over 31,000 eligible voters were barred from registering.
There is no question this is designed to suppress the votes of those who tend to vote for Democrats. Roughly 26 percent of young people (ages 18-29) move each year, versus 13 percent for the population overall. Almost half of Black voters under 30 do not have an ID reflecting a current name and address. Only about 20 percent of Americans who make under $50,000 have a passport. About 69 million women who changed their names upon marriage don’t have a birth certificate that would match the name on their current government photo ID.
But the bill would also affect people who tend to vote Republican. Rural voters who once were able to register by mail would have to trek to an election office, which might be significantly far away (this is the reason Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski opposes the bill). Blue state residents are more likely than their red state counterparts to have a passport, and Republican women change their name upon marriage at much higher rates than Democrats.
In reality, however, this discussion misses the point.
In making it vastly harder to register or re-register, the SAVE America Act makes civic participation something that feels onerous and complicated, and that is intended. The Trumpian project relies on people not caring what happens to the country, on them feeling like their vote doesn’t matter.
It’s tempting to characterize the SAVE America Act as a solution in search of a problem, but it is far more insidious. It’s meant to be the problem.
An overall sense of voter apathy is the desired outcome here, in both red and blue states. It’s an attempt to devalue one of our most important civic acts, to send the message that voting simply isn’t worth the hassle.
Additionally, by placing a huge burden on state and local election officials, one that will inevitably result in long lines and infinite frustration, it sends a message that the government can’t do anything right, can’t get things done.
In the end, Republicans are right about only one thing: voting should actually be as easy as going to the Olive Garden.
That’s it for now
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