FILE - An Allegheny County worker processes mail-in and absentee ballots in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. At rallies and in social media posts, former President Donald Trump has been trying to assure Republican voters that casting ballots by mail and other forms of early voting are “all good options.” (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
FILE - An Allegheny County worker processes mail-in and absentee ballots in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. At rallies and in social media posts, former President Donald Trump has been trying to assure Republican voters that casting ballots by mail and other forms of early voting are “all good options.” (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
Update: For more information on the SAVE America Act, read Votebeat’s article published on 2/16/26.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing major election reforms before the midterms. WITF’s Jordan Wilkie spoke with Votebeat managing editor Nathaniel Rakich about the bill and why Republicans are trying to push this long-shot bill now.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to a shortened version of the conversation above, or the full back-and-forth below. Or,
Jordan Wilkie: Nathaniel, your newsroom specializes in elections and how they’re run. So let’s talk about the Save America Act. If the bill is signed into law, what would voters have to do to be sure that they could vote in the primary or midterm elections?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: So this bill has two main provisions. First, it would require people who are registering to vote to prove their citizenship. If you’re already registered to vote, that wouldn’t affect you.
However, if you’re not registered to vote, you would basically have to bring proof of your citizenship in person to an elections office when you register, so that’s something like your passport or a combination of your birth certificate and your license.
The second half of the law, which would affect everybody, is a photo ID requirement when you are actually voting. Pennsylvania used to have a voter ID law, but that got struck down.
You basically have to show up with a driver’s license or your passport when you are at the polling place. Now, of course, this isn’t necessarily going to be easy for a lot of people, particularly I think the proof of citizenship requirement. Some people have lost access to those documents entirely. Some people don’t have passports. About half of Pennsylvanians don’t have passports. There are a lot of people who are worried about the inconvenience on voters to prove their citizenship.
Jordan Wilkie: I’ve seen a lot of coverage about this being particularly difficult on women. Could you elaborate on why that is?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: Yeah. So the idea there is that a married woman’s name might be different from the name on their birth certificate. [If you changed your name when you married], you would have to bring both your basic birth certificate and your license, and you’d have to basically attest, “Yes, I am the same person.”
Jordan Wilkie: This law would have to be implemented by someone. How would elections officials be affected by this law?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: I’ve talked to a lot of election officials who are worried about basically the speed of which this would be implemented. So this law, if it passes, would go into effect immediately. Obviously, the elections are coming up. Election officials already have a lot on their plates to prepare for that election. But this would add a lot of extra work in terms of verifying that citizenship requirement.
Jordan Wilkie: There’s an old adage among election officials of, “Don’t make a major change in a major election year.” This would be a pretty significant change. Is that right?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: Yes, definitely. I also talked to election officials who said that if Congress wants to make this change, they can do that. That is their legal right to set the rules for elections. But give some more time, a couple of years to implement this. Give some more money to hire additional staff to check these documents.
Jordan Wilkie: This bill doesn’t have a great shot politically of moving from the House to the Senate and then to the president’s desk. It has moved out of the House, approved by Republicans and one Democratic vote, but there isn’t a huge appetite for it in the Senate. Oftentimes lawmakers will advance a bill to send a message. What is the message that’s being sent by trying to advance this bill?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: There are two messages. Donald Trump’s message is to say that American elections are not secure, which they are. The rate of non-citizen voting is extremely low, but obviously he has been touting this idea that there has been rampant voter fraud for years.
Second, the message that house Republicans are trying to send is that they are trying to appease Trump. A lot of the House Republicans know that this is not going to get past the Senate, but they want to show their base – a base that is concerned about election security – that they are trying everything they can.
Jordan Wilkie: You mentioned securing elections. How secure are our elections already? How do we know?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: We know because there are people who do audits of results all the time. Secretaries of state, who are in charge of elections in most states, review the voter rolls constantly for non-citizens of the type that this law is trying to prevent. It’s always a minuscule fraction of voters who are found that are non-citizens. A single non-citizen voter is a problem, but the concern that a lot of opponents of this bill have is that it would disenfranchise a lot more voters who are valid because they don’t have the passport or the birth certificate necessary. The number of non-citizen voters that were found in the last election was somewhere like a few dozen. Do you want to prevent those few dozen voters versus preventing perhaps tens of thousands of eligible voters?
Jordan Wilkie: The language around this bill is nonpartisan. It’s election security. Is there a partisan impact for bills like this?
Nathaniel Rakich, Votebeat: Both parties think that there will be a partisan impact. It is true that the people who don’t have this kind of documentation do tend to be people who are non-white, which tend to support Democrats. I think that that assumption might be outdated because I think you saw in the 2024 election in particular that a lot of non-white voters, particularly Latinos, have been moving toward Republicans.
In addition, a lot of rural voters would be particularly inconvenienced by this because you’d have to go in person to prove your citizenship. That can be a hassle for somebody who lives an hour away from their elections office versus somebody who lives in a city. I don’t think actually it’s clear that there would be a partisan impact here.
Generally speaking, with these types of election laws, people make a big deal about voter ID laws or about vote-by-mail helping Republicans or Democrats, respectively. Academic studies generally have not borne that out. My starting assumption would be actually that it would have a neutral partisan impact.
Jordan Wilkie: Thank you very much.
The audio version of this story was produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
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