President Donald Trump pauses to speak to the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on June 15, 2025 in Washington.
Tasos Katopodis | Getty Images
President Donald Trump is escalating his push for voter identification requirements after pledging an executive order last week to implement such requirements before November’s midterm elections.
White House press secretary Caroline Levitt said in a briefing Wednesday that Trump is “discussing and exploring legal options for a potential executive order regarding voter identification,” days after Trump said he would find a way to require voters nationwide to show identification “with or without Congressional approval.”
Levitt’s comments came after Trump Truth Social posted an article Tuesday night saying local elected officials are urging Georgia officials to carry over voting in Fulton County, the target of a recent FBI investigation and a district that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Trump is scheduled to visit another part of Georgia on Thursday to talk about the economy.
President Trump’s recent election obsession and Congressional Republicans’ near-sympathetic stance have alarmed Democrats and voting rights groups, who see the latest moves as a potential existential threat to American elections and an extension of President Trump’s past election denialism.
The topic was clearly on the president’s mind. In a series of reposts to Truth Social following his initial post on Wednesday, Trump shared unsubstantiated claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
“(Democrats) are not asking for voter IDs because they want to rig the election,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Monday. “Even if they have voter ID, even if they have proof of citizenship, they will never win an election. And they know it. And they are fighting them tooth and nail.”
“If (Republicans) win the election, they won fair and square,” Rep. Greg Stanton, an Arizona Democrat, said in an interview this week. “But when you lose an election, Donald Trump likes to say it was based on fraud.”
Stanton is chairman of the New Democratic Coalition Action Fund, a political action committee that works to elect moderate Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives. He called President Trump’s threat to unilaterally impose voter ID requirements “absolute nonsense.”
Rep. Joe Morrell (D.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, similarly said, “The Constitution is very clear.”
“The time, place and manner of elections will be at the discretion of each state. … Congress may also become involved at its discretion, but the president has no role,” Morrell said in an interview Wednesday.
SAVE America Act moves to Senate
Meanwhile, support is growing among Senate Republicans for a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and an ID to vote.
The SAVE America Act targets noncitizens voting, which is already illegal, extremely rare, and requires voter ID. It passed the House last week on a 218-213 vote, with only one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, voting yes.
Public opinion polls show that each of the bill’s major components has wide support. But opponents say the bill could disenfranchise millions of people and create barriers to voting for minorities, college students and married women who have changed their last names.
While some Republicans in Congress have expressed opposition to Trump in recent months on tariffs and Affordable Care Act subsidies, most have followed Trump’s lead on the election.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is the only Senate Republican to publicly oppose the bill, although nearly all of her Republican colleagues have signed on.
Still, the bill faces an uphill climb in the Senate, where rules require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, meaning more than a handful of Democrats would need to vote with their Republican colleagues to advance the bill.
Republican supporters of the bill, including its lead sponsor, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), are calling for filibuster rules to be changed to allow a simple majority to win. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R.S.D.) promised a vote on his SAVE America Act, but was tepid about the idea of changing the filibuster.
Meanwhile, a second, more far-reaching election reform proposal is emerging in the House of Representatives.
In addition to requiring voter ID and citizenship, the Make Elections Great Again Act, introduced by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Brian Still in January, would disqualify mail-in ballots received after polls close on Election Day, require states to use auditable paper ballots, and ban ballot harvesting, ranked-choice voting, and universal voting by mail.
A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) declined to comment when asked if the speaker intended to vote on the MEGA Act, instead pointing to the speaker’s past comments regarding passage of the SAVE America Act. The House Administration Committee, chaired by Steil, held a hearing on the MEGA Act last week.
Steil said during a recent appearance on Fox Business after the House passed the SAVE America Act that Republicans “need to build on that effort.”
“I think we need to clean up the voter rolls. I think we should make sure we have ballots in by the end of Election Day. We need proper, auditable ballots. The list goes on,” Steil said.
