The Trump administration reportedly pushed to add language banning most mail-in voting as part of the SAVE America Act, a Republican-backed voter ID law that cleared the House last week.
The apparent effort, reported by Politico, accords with the president’s public calls to slash mail voting, which he has baselessly claimed is prone to mass fraud.
The week of the vote on the SAVE America Act, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Republicans must “fight” for “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)” because “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World.”
A White House website about the SAVE legislation echoes the demand.
The president “has repeatedly urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting to ensure the safety and security of our elections,” White House official Abigail Jackson told the outlet.
The SAVE bill, which is unlikely to pass the Senate, ultimately did not include mail-in voting restrictions.
It did, however, require voters to have proof of U.S. citizenship and photo ID, and it lets the Department of Security access state voter rolls.
It is already illegal to vote if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the Brennan Center estimates that some 21 million U.S. citizens don’t have ready access to the documents they need to comply with the law.
Backers of the president’s voting agenda frame it as a way to stop voter fraud, a phenomenon evidence shows is extremely rare and inconsequential.
“This is how you stop them from stealing it,” Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee recently said of the bill.
Critics of the SAVE Act and another GOP bill in the House, which would ban universal mail-in voting, prohibit ballot counting after election day, and ban ranked-choice voting, allege that the president and his allies are trying to make it harder to vote amid a midterm season in which they are forecast to lose ground to Democrats.
“If you were concerned about our elections, you would be encouraging them to vote,” Rep. Joseph D. Morelle of New York told The New York Times this week. “The larger point is this: They are doing anything they can to disrupt the elections.”
Despite the president’s arguments, Republicans in battleground states have spent months encouraging their base to use mail-in voting.
“Treating early voting as optional, or something Democrats do, is a losing gamble,” Wisconsin Republican Party chair Brian Schimming told reporters in December.
President Trump himself has previously used mail-in voting to cast his ballot.
The Republican has pushed to exert more federal control over elections, which the Constitution largely leaves to states to manage.
He has urged Republicans to “nationalize” control of elections and threatened to impose voter ID requirements without congressional approval.
“We cannot let the Democrats get away with NO VOTER I.D. any longer,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon. “These are horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS.”
“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” he wrote in another post. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”
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