Democrats need a better answer on voter ID. Here’s one.

Story by Ed Kilgore
• 2d • 3 min read





Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Getty Images© Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Getty Images

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 non-germane prohibitions on transgender sports participation and gender-affirming treatments for minors.

Democrats are fully justified in saying not just “no” but “hell no” to Trump’s demands. But their own political interests might be better served by finding a way to support or even counter propose the simple voter ID requirements that Americans (including big majorities of Democrats) overwhelmingly support.

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Americans also support voting-law reforms that Democrats typically favor. A major Pew survey in 2025 showed 80 percent favor the universal availability of two weeks of early in-person voting; 74 percent favor making Election Day a national holiday; 66 favor restoring voting rights for ex-felons; 59 percent favor automatic voter registration of all eligible voters; 58 percent favor a universal right to vote by mail; and 58 percent favor allowing people to register to vote on Election Day.

There’s also an obvious grand bargain on voting reforms that should be on the table instead of the wildly partisan SAVE America Act, as Bloomberg’s Ron Brownstein recently noted:

The [best] option is one Congress hardly considers anymore: Pursue a durable, bipartisan agreement that marries the priorities of both parties. …
[R]equiring photo identification to vote has preponderant public support, and, with a reasonable list of acceptable documents, is unlikely to be a deal-breaker for Democrats. In return, Democrats probably couldn’t ask Republicans to require no-excuse mail balloting in every state (given how Trump’s obsessive hostility to it has permeated the party). But with voter ID as the sweetener, there might be some Republicans willing to accept other widely popular 2021 ideas such as nationwide automatic and same-day registration, guaranteed early voting and rights restoration for the formerly incarcerated.

Best of all, a deal that includes a modest voter ID requirement without onerous proof of citizenship could outflank Republicans on their most popular election-reform idea and rebut the presumption that Democrats want loosey-goosey voter rolls just like Trump claims.

To deal with residual fears of largely imaginary noncitizen voting (and the recent disclosure by New Jersey’s Democratic governor of a software error that allowed over 6,000 noncitizens to register to vote showed they aren’t totally imaginary), enhanced criminal penalties for anyone involved in deliberate voter fraud should be folded into every Democratic voting-rights proposal.

To be clear, a detailed “grand bargain” proposal will be difficult to develop, if only because Democrats will differ on what to demand in exchange for voter ID, and Republicans will differ on how far to retreat from the extremist position Trump has turned into MAGA gospel. But it could be very useful for the Democratic Party to move from “no” and “hell no” on election reform to “no, but” or, better yet, “yes, if.”
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Either non-Trump or post-Trump Republicans will consider bargaining over this, or they will confirm long-standing suspicions that the GOP wants to use voting rules to turn a minority of the electorate into a majority by brute force. It’s a fight Democrats should and must be willing to have.

Democrats need a better answer on voter ID. Here’s one.