The Republican Plan To Nationalize Elections Is Performative Nonsense

During my younger days as a soccer dad, I got to watch the variety of ways that people handled the inevitable wins and losses. The trophy my daughter won after a big championship game is packed in a box somewhere in the garage, but the memories remain. Life is about more than winning—and indeed most people involved in the games were good sports.

But I remember some teams for which winning was everything. Their players would punch, kick, and trip our players whenever the referees weren’t looking. The coaches constantly intimidated the refs. What’s the likelihood that one’s team is right on every single call? Not high, but these competitors never conceded anything. That experience reminds me of the modern Republican approach to elections.

Under Donald Trump’s leadership, the GOP’s outlook is simple: Every election they win is a reflection of the will of the people. Every election they lose is rigged. The president never conceded the 2020 election, nor apologized for the January 6 Capitol attack. That was the result of angry partisans taking seriously Trump’s bogus election-fraud claims. Trump continues to push the tiresome rigged-election narrative even though he failed to win the dozens of court cases making such claims.

Lately, Republicans aren’t doing well at the polls. A Democrat just won a statehouse victory to represent the Florida district that includes Mar-A-Lago. She’s the 30th Democrat since 2025 to flip a seat in a heavily Republican district. That’s not surprising. The party out of power often does well in special elections and midterms. Republicans have pushed an unusually divisive agenda, inflation is high, gas prices are soaring, ICE raids are frightening, and the president has launched a Middle East war. So, yeah, there’s going to be electoral pushback.

Instead of moderating their policies or engaging in normal soul searching, Republicans are doubling down—and trying to nationalize elections by promoting something called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act. It would impose draconian voter-identification requirements. The bill would require voters to provide a birth certificate or passport for registration, with the potential for disenfranchising vast numbers of voters, as many Americans don’t have a passport or can no longer find their birth certificate.

When Congress required a Real ID for traveling, it provided years for Americans to comply. This legislation would take effect before the midterms.

It’s also a red herring. One can always find examples of illegal voting in a nation with 340 million people, but there’s no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens. Even a major MAGA-aligned think tank can only find a tiny number of incidents. (Ironically, some of the most prominent illegal-vote examples involve Republicans.) There is no voting crisis that demands federal intervention.

The legislation also takes aim at mail-in voting, which is ironic given that Trump himself used that system to cast his vote in Florida. Again, there’s no evidence that vote-by-mail is any less secure than traditional in-person voting systems. Given the bill’s iffy chances of passage, Republicans are cynically trying to build a case to challenge an election they believe they are going to lose. They’ll blame losses on Congress’ failure to fix a supposedly broken election system. It’s politics as performance art. But if it does pass, it could lead to serious voter suppression.

Our Constitution—you know, the document that Republicans continually attack—gives state legislatures the primary power to determine the election ground rules, although it does provide Congress with a role. There’s certainly no role for presidential executive orders, as the president prefers. As the Institute for Responsive Government notes, the nation’s decentralized election system also makes a federal takeover impractical. The current process, run by local civil servants, is designed to make it harder for fraudsters and partisans to engage in shenanigans. Conservatives used to understand that federalism is one of the core founding principles that protects our freedoms, but not any more.

Of course, Democrats have in the past also tried to nationalize elections, with one onerous example occurring during the Biden administration. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is known for the election antics of its Democratic political machine. But the answer isn’t for Republicans to one-up those efforts with their own election-rigging measure.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached a situation best described by the New America group: “When two-party competition becomes an existential zero-sum contest over the rules of the game itself, the incentive shifts from persuading voters to controlling the machinery of voting.” I have no real problem with Voter ID if it boosts Americans’ confidence in elections, but this measure would erode trust in the process. Trump has been disturbingly clear that this isn’t about creating better elections. He’s trying to control the voting machinery to achieve his desired results.

Like with soccer, playing dirty only undermines the sanctity of the game. In democracies, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But if the GOP succeeds with its Trump-inspired dirty tricks, then we’re all at risk of losing our democracy.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.