Trump fans flames of election access as GOP supports voter ID mandate

President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade for voter-identification requirements after last week’s promise of an executive order to implement such a mandate before November’s midterm elections.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a briefing Wednesday said Trump is “discussing and exploring legal options for a potential executive order with respect to voter ID,” days after Trump said he would find a way to require voters to present identification across the U.S. “whether approved by Congress or not!”

Leavitt’s comments followed a Tuesday night Trump Truth Social post of an article about a local elected official urging the Georgia state government to take over voting in Fulton County, the target of a recent FBI raid and a precinct that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Trump is planning to travel to a different part of Georgia on Thursday to talk about the economy.

Trump’s recent fixation on elections and congressional Republicans’ willingness to largely fall in line are raising alarms for Democrats and voting rights groups, who see the recent moves as a potential existential threat to American elections and an extension of Trump’s past election denialism.

The topic has apparently been front of mind for the president. In a series of reposts on Truth Social that followed his initial post Wednesday, Trump shared unfounded claims about irregularities in the 2020 election.

“[Democrats] don’t want voter ID because they want to cheat at elections,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Monday. “If you had voter ID, if you had proof of citizenship, they could never win an election. And they know that. And they’re fighting them to the hilt.”

“When [Republicans] win an election, they win fair and square,” Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., said in an interview this week. “But then when they lose elections, Donald Trump likes to say it was based on fraud.”

Stanton is the chair of the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund, a political action committee that works to get moderate Democrats elected to the U.S. House. He called Trump’s threat to unilaterally impose voter ID requirements “purely bluster.”

Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, similarly said “the Constitution is pretty clear.”

“Time, place and manner of elections shall be up to the states … Congress may at its discretion get involved as well. But there’s no role for the president,” Morelle said in an interview Wednesday.

SAVE America Act moves to the Senate

Meanwhile, support is growing among the Senate GOP for a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and to present identification to cast a ballot.

The SAVE America Act targets noncitizen voting, which is already illegal and exceedingly rare, and requires voter ID. It advanced out of the House last week on a 218-213 vote, with just one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, voting in favor. 

Both of the bill’s main components are broadly popular, according to public polling. But opponents say the legislation could disenfranchise millions and create barriers to voting for minorities, college students and married women who changed their last names.

While some congressional Republicans have shown a willingness to buck Trump in recent months on things like tariffs and Affordable Care Act subsidies, most have followed his lead on elections.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is the lone Senate Republican to publicly oppose the bill, while nearly all of her GOP colleagues have signed on.

Still, the measure faces an uphill climb in the Senate, where rules require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, meaning more than a handful of Democrats would have to vote with their Republican colleagues to advance the legislation.

GOP proponents of the bill, including its lead sponsor Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have called for changing the filibuster rule to allow a simple majority to prevail. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has promised a vote on the SAVE America Act, which he supports, but has been cool to the idea of changing the filibuster. 

Meanwhile, a second, even broader election reform proposal has cropped up in the House. 

In addition to requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship, the Make Elections Great Again Act, introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., in January would disqualify mail-in ballots received after the close of polls on Election Day, require states to use auditable paper ballots, and ban ballot harvesting, ranked choice voting and universal vote-by-mail. 

A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declined to comment when asked if he plans to bring the MEGA Act to the floor, instead referring to the speaker’s past comments on the passage of the SAVE America Act. The House Administration Committee, which Steil chairs, held a hearing on the MEGA Act last week.

During a recent appearance on Fox Business after House passage of the SAVE America Act, Steil said Republicans “need to build on that work.”

“I think we need to clean up our voter rolls. I think we should make sure that ballots are in by the end of Election Day. We need proper, auditable ballots. The list goes on,” Steil said.