The voting restrictions Trump really wants

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump abruptly called off a confirmation hearing for his pick to lead the intelligence community, shocking Senate Republicans.

It means that for now, the nation’s top intelligence official will soon be a mortgage agency director and Trump ally without any experience in national intelligence. Bill Pulte has been an advocate of prosecuting Trump’s political opponents, and there is bipartisan opposition in Congress to having him in charge of sensitive intelligence agencies.

But Trump wants something else in exchange for having nominated a more neutral pick, Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor: for Congress to pass major changes to how people vote by the midterm elections, when his party could lose control of Congress.

Here’s what the Save America Act would do.

1. You’d have to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote: Millions of Americans register to vote every year, and they are already required to verify they are citizens when they do. Under this bill, they would have to prove it.

For example, those who change states, or are newly eligible to vote, would have to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, a military ID submitted with proof of place of birth, or — when submitted alongside other documents — a birth certificate. Newly married voters who change their last name would have to reregister to vote with all of these documents — plus provide proof as to why their current name doesn’t match the one on their birth certificate.

But about half of Americans don’t have passports, and not all Americans have copies of their birth certificates.

“Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents,” writes the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

Even some Republican election experts have questioned whether all this documentation is necessary.

“The premise of the Save Act is we need to ensure there are processes that confirm citizenship,” Matt Germer, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank, said in an interview as the House was voting on the bill earlier this year. “But I think much of the burden of citizenship verification should be on the government, which holds much of this data in the first place.”

2. It requires IDs to vote nationwide: Strong majorities of Americans, including Democrats, support voters presenting a photo ID to cast ballots.

Only government (state, tribal or federal) IDs would be accepted.

3. It would probably make voting by mail more difficult: Mail-in voting is popular and safe, election experts say. Almost all states offer some form of it. Trump has voted by mail, and Republicans certainly use it, too.

But this bill would strictly restrict who can vote by mail without providing valid identification. Some disabled voters and active-duty troops would be exempt from the new rules.

Some Republican election officials have expressed concern that this takes away from states’ constitutional right to run their own elections how they best see fit. Mail-in voting first became popular among rural conservatives in Western states.

“When I was in office,” former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson said in a recent interview, “the number one principle of election administration was that the states run elections and Congress should be minimally involved. On the Republican side, we really believed that. It was really, really important.”