Republicans in the Senate are set to take up a voting overhaul known as the SAVE America Act, a key priority for President Trump.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Republicans in the Senate are set to take up an issue this week that is near and dear to President Trump’s heart – noncitizen voting.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It has never been shown to be a widespread problem in American elections, but Trump continues to insist that it is. And he’s been pushing Senate Republicans to get around a procedural hurdle by blowing up the legislative filibuster to pass new voting restrictions ahead of this year’s midterms.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks is here with us now. So, Miles, this bill is called the SAVE America Act. What is it?
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: So it’s a major elections overhaul. It would require all voters to show photo ID to vote, but the most notable change is actually on the registration side of things. The bill would require people to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship when they register to vote, which may not sound like a big deal. The vast majority of Americans believe that only Americans should vote in American elections. But having the documents to prove that citizenship is a whole different beast. We’re talking about a birth certificate or a passport in most cases, and research has shown that tens of millions of Americans do not have easy access to either of those documents, notably because they’re expensive to acquire. We just got a passport for our daughter, A, a couple weeks ago, and it cost hundreds of dollars to get.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. And, you know, that’s a lot of people, and primaries are already underway. When would this new law then take effect?
PARKS: It would be immediate. So then when you think about the millions of people who could potentially be negatively impacted versus these relatively few cases of noncitizen voting that we see every election cycle, that’s why election experts basically look at this overhaul and say, this could create an administrative nightmare with very little upside.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So what are the bill’s chances then?
PARKS: President Trump is pushing hard for it, and he’s also pushing to expand it, to restrict vote by mail in a lot of instances, as well. But it is looking increasingly likely he’s going to be disappointed when it gets to a vote this week. To pass, the bill needs 60 votes to overcome the Senate filibuster. Senate Democrats are a flat-out no. So Republicans have just 53 votes, and there is currently no appetite on the GOP side of things to change the Senate rules to circumvent that filibuster, that 60-vote threshold. That’s all according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who alluded last week when talking to reporters that he’s basically between a rock and a hard place between his colleagues in the Senate and the president.
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JOHN THUNE: It’s about the votes. It’s about the math. And I’m – for better or worse, I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist about what we can achieve here.
PARKS: It’s an interesting moment politically, though, because Trump has insisted that this bill be expansive, not a watered-down version, he says. But if it were narrower or more targeted specifically at the photo ID provision, for instance, it might have a better chance of getting these Republicans on board and even getting some Senate Democrats.
MARTÍNEZ: President Trump, when he talked about this bill in the State of the Union, he repeated a very familiar lie, saying that it was needed because Democrats can only win elections if they cheat. Are we likely to see more of that messaging, that language, if the bill fails?
PARKS: I mean, if the midterms do not go Republicans’ way, almost certainly. I think the bigger question is whether these sort of election lies that Trump has been pushing for years are as potent now as they were in the time after 2020, for instance. The president won the 2024 election. He won the popular vote, and his voters universally said that that was a well-run election. So the question now is, do those people believe this same system is now rigged against him just two years later? NPR just released a poll with PBS News and Marist College (ph) that’s sort of pointed in both directions on that. The majority of Republican voters said they do believe voter fraud’s going to happen in the midterms, but a majority of them also said they expect their state or locality to run a good election. I think if Trump keeps pushing these sort of lies, you can expect that latter number to go down.
MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Miles Parks. Thanks a lot, Miles.
PARKS: Thanks, A.
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