Voter ID: Political Suicide for Republicans

Ted Rall
Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:17:29 -0800
Opinion

It's common sense, Republicans say. You have to show ID to buy a beer, board a plane, or land a job as a snow shoveler. Why not require proof of identity from those who seek to exercise our most sacred civic right, casting a vote?

According to the polls, the GOP has won the argument. Most Americans favor a voter ID law.

What Republicans are currently pressing for, the SAVE Act, however, is not a voter ID law, a requirement that registered voters prove who they are when they go to the polls. SAVE is a "prove you're a citizen" law.
Updated: Fri Mar 06, 2026

It's common sense, Republicans say. You have to show ID to buy a beer, board a plane, or land a job as a snow shoveler. Why not require proof of identity from those who seek to exercise our most sacred civic right, casting a vote?

According to the polls, the GOP has won the argument. Most Americans favor a voter ID law.

What Republicans are currently pressing for, the SAVE Act, however, is not a voter ID law, a requirement that registered voters prove who they are when they go to the polls. SAVE is a "prove you're a citizen" law.

Why is the GOP pushing SAVE? Republican voters will be hit hardest. Clearly, neither President Donald Trump nor the Republican Party knows what's good for them.

A voter ID law — something most states, especially red ones, currently have — passes the common-sense test for most Americans because it requires a form of identity nine out of 10 people have, or can obtain fairly easily, like a driver's license or non-driver's state identification card. Some states even take non-photo IDs. Voter ID laws have been promoted by Republicans primarily because they limit or eliminate mail-in voting, which they wrongly assume benefits Democrats.

The SAVE Act goes much further than Voter ID. In an attempt to improve Republican candidates' chances under the guise of protecting voting integrity, it tries to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Ironically, it will have the opposite effect.

Voter ID attempts to verify who you are. SAVE requires you to show proof of citizenship in the form of a passport or a birth certificate with your current name on it. (Noncitizens can get a driver's license.) Far more Democrats have proof of citizenship than Republicans.

Fewer than half of U.S. citizens hold a passport. For these elites, the SAVE Act would be a breeze. Sixty-four percent of Americans with a household income above $100,000 have a passport, while only 21% of those earning under $50,000 do. Upper-middle-class voters lean Democratic; poor ones lean Republican.

Roughly half of 2024 Trump voters have passports, compared to two-thirds of Kamala Harris voters. The 13 states with the lowest passport rates all voted Republican in 2024. Congressional districts with low passport ownership are overwhelmingly GOP-held, rural and/or Southern. Rural voters (a GOP stronghold) face longer drives to election offices for in-person verification. Older voters, military personnel, tribal citizens and working-class Americans — Republican-leaning demographic groups — are less likely to have the required documents.

A substantial number of voters don't have a physical copy of their birth certificate. Research by the Brennan Center "indicates that more than 9% of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don't have proof of citizenship readily available. There are myriad reasons for this — the documents might be in the home of another family member or in a safety deposit box. And at least 3.8 million don't have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen."

Poor voters — who tend to vote Republican — live more disorganized, mobile lives. They're less likely to know where their birth certificate is or how to obtain a new one, or be motivated to find out.

SAVE would effectively repeal women's suffrage. "84 percent of women who marry change their surname, meaning as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate with their legal name on it and thereby could not use their birth certificate to prove citizenship," notes the Center for American Progress. "The SAVE Act makes no mention of being able to show a marriage certificate or change-of-name documentation."

Women who change their names — twice as likely to be Republican — would have to present themselves at their county board of elections office, which is only open during business hours, when most people work.

There, local election workers — overwhelmed by a sudden surge of applicants — would have to sort through each individual's marriage and divorce decrees and other miscellany to determine whether Mrs. Jane Doe, nee Jane Smith, is eligible to vote. Given that SAVE mandates a fine and prison time for an election official who wrongly allows someone to vote, even someone who is a citizen but without the right documents, the path of least resistance for a beleaguered, poorly paid local election clerk would be to reject rather than approve name-change voters, including trans people.

After decades of easing voting with same-day registration, automatic registration with driver's license renewals, early and mail-in voting, SAVE would make voting much harder. Many people will choose not to vote rather than jump through so many bureaucratic hoops for the right to choose between a center-left and center-right party, neither of which delivers for them. Here is the purpose of SAVE — to radically reduce the number of voters.

Most of whom, hilariously, are Republican.

It's bizarre that the Right is fighting for SAVE. Democratic worries about discouraging working-class voters are sweet but run counter to their interests. As the 2024 election proved, poor and lower-middle-class voters are no longer theirs to lose. If Democrats were smart, they'd be the party pushing the SAVE Act — or getting out of its way.

The GOP wants SAVE because they haven't internalized the class reversal in the American electorate. Republicans have become the party of the working poor (even if they don't care about them), while Democrats are now the party of coastal elites (though they pretend to champion Joe and Jane Sixpack).

If passed, and signed into law, the SAVE Act is likely to backfire for its Republican sponsors in the same way that Trump's advice to MAGA followers not to use write-in ballots contributed to his loss in 2020.