The GOP's voter ID bill is back and as cynical as ever

There’s something very cynical about Republicans’ efforts this week to pass a law requiring massive changes to the nation’s voting laws ahead of the November midterms. They must think Americans are easily fooled.

The proposal, the SAVE America Act, revives a stalled 2025 effort to require Americans to show a government ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register. The measure passed the House last spring, but it never moved in the Senate.

Now it’s back, on the heels of the president’s call to have Republicans "nationalize" the elections and take control away from the states. That’s exactly the opposite of what the Constitution requires, but it fits with President Donald Trump’s grand plan to disrupt the vote in November.

In the last few weeks, Trump has wrongly said that "a state is an agent for the federal government in elections," and the Department of Justice has doubled down on its demands that states like Minnesota turn over privileged voter file data.

On Tuesday, we got a clue about what the agency wants to do with those files. A court unsealed the search warrant in last month’s FBI raid of election offices in Fulton County, Georgia. The warrant revealed what skeptics feared: that the Justice Department is basing its probe on debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The new version of the SAVE Act fuels more of the president’s conspiracies — the ones relating to voting by mail. The act requires anyone who wants a mail-in ballot to provide proof of citizenship in person. Americans may be able to do their banking, file their taxes and get medical records online, but if this becomes law, they won’t be able to apply online for a mail ballot.

The bill also has a new provision that attempts to circumvent a series of court rulings blocking the Department of Homeland Security from obtaining access to state voter rolls. At least three courts have ruled that because federal law gives states jurisdiction over election administration, it’s not the executive branch’s role to pick apart voter files in search of illegal voters. The bill has states purge voter rolls every 30 days and regularly submit all voter data to DHS — a tacit acknowledgment by House Republicans that the Trump administration doesn’t have the power to do it without a new law.

The House Rules Committee voted 9-4 Tuesday night to send the bill to the full House for a vote. The debate is likely to focus on the part of the bill that most Americans agree with — requiring voters to present a photo ID to vote.

"You already need a photo ID to get on a flight, to buy a pack of cigarettes or to open a bank account. Shouldn't one of the most important duties we have as citizens voting be held to at least the same standard?" argued House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican.

The answer, I would suggest, is yes. But if requiring photo IDs were the goal, the bill would stop there. It doesn’t, and critics argue the new paperwork burdens will discourage voting. What’s more, every state and the District of Columbia already require voters to present some form of identification before their ballot is counted.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 36 states require voters to show a photo ID to vote and the rest use other methods to verify a voter’s identity, such as signature matching. States are also already required to verify citizenship and voter identity using state and federal databases.

Republicans call these existing rules "weak," but when the right-wing Heritage Foundation assembled a database of election fraud cases, the Bipartisan Policy Center found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1977 and 2023.

Another research review released this week by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research found that when states review their voter rolls, they consistently find potential noncitizen registrants "amount to no more than a few tenths of one percent of the eligible voters in a state."

Of course, supporters of the bill argue that any level of fraud in U.S. elections is unacceptable.

"The standard should not be whether fraud is widespread. The standard should be zero," said Rep. Erin Houchin, an Indiana Republican at the Tuesday hearing.

It’s a reasonable argument — but only if you ignore that to get to zero, you must disenfranchise many. And that’s exactly what the bill sets out to do.

If the Save America Act is enacted, voters will no longer be able to register to vote with a state-issued driver’s license or student ID. They will have to provide a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers. The Pew Research Center found 84% of married American women have changed their surnames, making their birth certificates no longer eligible proof of citizenship. When they register to vote for the first time or at a new address, these women will also have to provide a marriage license or document that proves their name change.

Those requirements could stop as many as 21 million Americans from voting, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice. Nearly half of Americans don’t have a passport, and millions don't have easy access to a paper copy of their birth certificate, the analysis found.

Instead of saying an inconsequential level of fraud is intolerable, Republicans should be wondering why disenfranchising millions is acceptable. Judging by the president’s statements and the Department of Justice’s actions, we know the answer.

It will now be up to the Senate Democrats to block the bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said Tuesday that he didn’t see enough support in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.

Thune’s comments came about the same time the Republican-dominated House Rules Committee was making one final change to its proposal. Voting along party lines, the committee changed the effective date of the act from 2027 to "upon becoming law."

The strategy had come into focus. They voted to impose what may go down in congressional history as the most oppressive voting bill on record to save elections from a threat that doesn’t exist because Republicans appear headed for defeat in November.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and member of the committee, summed it up perfectly: "The real fraud here isn't happening at the ballot box,’’ she said. "It’s this bill."

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.