What’s inside the one bill Trump most desperately wants to become law

A sweeping set of national requirements for voters. An empowered DHS. What would happen if the SAVE America Act passed?

President Donald Trump has been on a single-minded, months-long quest to try and get one particular bill — the SAVE America Act — through Congress.

It’s a bill that would transform voting registration and ballot-casting across the country by creating strict nationwide requirements to prove citizenship when registering, to show photo ID when voting, and to include photocopies of ID for voting by mail.

And Trump’s obsession with getting it passed has swallowed up practically everything the GOP-controlled Congress has tried to do this year.

He’s said he won’t sign other bills — a bipartisan housing bill, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization — until SAVE America gets passed. He’s heaped pressure on GOP Senate leaders to eliminate the chamber’s filibuster, so SAVE America could advance with a simple majority (rather than needing 60 votes, since Republicans only have 53). He’s tried to slip it into this year’s “budget reconciliation” bill, which can’t be filibustered; when the Senate parliamentarian ruled he couldn’t, he demanded her firing.

Some Republicans claim that the bill is merely a simple, commonsense effort to close loopholes in the voter system that bad actors could take advantage of — to ensure that only citizens are actually voting and that the people showing up to vote are who they say they are.

But the intensity of its support on the MAGA right goes well beyond that: The bill’s strongest supporters — including the president and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — are those who advance the false conspiracy theory that Democrats rig elections through unauthorized immigrants illegally voting, bogus mail ballots, and other malfeasance. They claim they’re so desperate to pass it to stop this outrageous electoral theft.

Election experts point out there’s no real evidence that non-citizen voting is a serious problem. “All the evidence is that very few non-citizens get on the rolls, almost all those cases are accidental — and even among the people who get on the rolls, tiny percentages of them vote,” says Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Progressives argue that, in practice, these strict requirements would make it much harder for many citizens to register, vote, and have their votes counted. Indeed, they say, that’s probably Trump’s true goal: to suppress Democrats’ voters and make it easier for the GOP to win — or to outright steal elections like he tried to do in 2020. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has said the bill would be “Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.”

“It’s about voter suppression: putting Trump’s DHS in charge of who stays on the rolls, purging eligible voters, and blocking millions from registering,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in March, adding, “That’s not democracy, that’s........

© Vox