Donald Trump’s incessant crusade for the immediate enactment of the SAVE America Act is very likely to fail — thanks to a Senate Democratic filibuster that a crucial number of Senate Republicans refuse to kill. The bill’s proponents keep dishonestly insisting that the legislation just requires voter ID. In fact, its explicit aim is to require extensive proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, not just identification at the polls or accompanying mail ballots. But the SAVE impasse will likely strengthen the grip of Trump-fed conspiracy theories about Democrats needing illegal votes to win, at least among Republicans and perhaps even some swing voters. Concerns about vote integrity probably aren’t going to go away, whether they’re justified or not.

The SAVE America Act’s less explicit aim is to disrupt the 2026 midterms, since implementing a whole new national voter-registration system and then purging voter rolls to comply with it would take years to accomplish in any sort of reasonable and orderly manner. And its rarely acknowledged by-product would be a federal takeover of state-election administration, something Republicans fiercely resisted when Democrats sought to enact federal voting-rights legislation when they last controlled Congress and the White House. On top of everything else, what Trump calls the “full version” of the SAVE America Act includes drastic restrictions on voting by mail, along with........

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