Why I Believe the Senate Must Reject the SAVE America Act

Polls consistently show that Americans’ top concern is the cost of living, particularly housing and health care. The president made life more expensive by dragging the United States into an unjustified war with Iran, driving up gas prices even higher. A reasonable voter might conclude that Republicans in Congress, who control the House and Senate and are facing dismal poll numbers, would focus on ending the war and reducing costs for Americans.

These voters would be wrong.

Instead, Republicans are particularly obsessed with disenfranchising millions of voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

How obsessed? Trump’s recent executive order aims to change mail-in voting laws and would establish a list of voters in each state he deems “eligible.” He and congressional Republicans are desperate to undermine free and fair elections and control who can vote. Trump’s allies in Congress are touting the so-called SAVE America Act as an “election integrity” bill that simply requires ID to vote. This is extremely misleading because their bill is, in fact, a frontal attack on the fundamental right of Americans to vote in upcoming elections, including the 2026 midterms.

Americans couldn’t use a driver’s license, or even a REAL ID driver’s license. Instead, they would need a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, and the name must match on each document. This would put millions of married women at risk of losing their right to vote. U.S. service members could not use a military ID to register to vote, nor could Native Americans use a tribally issued ID.

Millions of Americans do not have access to their birth certificate or passport. Half of Americans don’t have a passport, and it costs an average of $130 to get one, meaning this legislation is little more than a Jim Crow-style “poll tax” for millions of low-income Americans. This would come as workers struggle to pay for food, gas, housing and child care due to Trump’s failed economic policies and unnecessary wars.

The SAVE Act also overrides state election law, such as Wisconsin’s, that allows voters to register to vote the same day, online or by mail, a policy particularly helpful to voters with disabilities and rural voters. It grants unprecedented power to an executive branch that has peddled voter fraud plots, tried to blackmail states for election data and revived Trump’s 2020 election defeat through efforts such as FBI raids in Georgia and Arizona.

Specifically, this legislation would require state governments to turn over their voter records to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a questionable proposition under the U.S. Constitution.

The architect of this legislation, Rep. Bryan Steil, who represents my hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, would disenfranchise his constituents and millions of other Americans.

Despite Republican claims, actual cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, according to numerous studies. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation conducted an in-depth study of voter fraud going back 25 years and found that actual instances of fraudulent votes amounted to 0.0000845 percent, or 36 instances of fraudulent votes out of 42,626,379 ballots cast.