silverguide.site –

Donald Trump is going all out to pressure the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which he insists on calling the Save America Act. On 8 March, he posted on Truth Social: “It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed … MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL … ”

The New York Times reports that the president “has called the measure his ‘No. 1 priority,’ saying it would ‘guarantee the midterms’ for his party.” He has even asked Senate Republicans to use their majority to end the filibuster and pass the bill.

The measure would make voting even more onerous than it already is. It would require voters to prove their citizenship in person when they register to vote.

It would severely limit mail-in voting or online registration, require documentary proof of US citizenship, and require states to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, which could then order voters purged from the voting rolls.

The Save Act is a solution in search of a problem, since fraudulent voting by non-citizens almost never happens in this country. And while it is unlikely to pass the Senate, it represents a dramatic shift in the federal government’s attitude toward voting.

It is clear that, whether or not the Save Act ever becomes law, more needs to be done to counteract Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to undermine confidence in voting and elections in the United States. If they defeat the Save Act, progressives and other pro-democracy groups cannot rest on their laurels.

They have much work to do to educate the American public about voting and to reverse the public’s declining faith in the electoral process. This will require an infusion of new resources not just to convince eligible voters to cast their ballots, but also to convince them that voting still works and that elections can be counted on to faithfully reflect the will of the people.

One can get a sense of the magnitude of the challenge from the results of a Marist poll released on 11 March. It found that two-thirds of Americans are confident that the 2026 election will be fair and that the votes will be counted accurately.

But that is ten percentage points less than the number who expressed such confidence in advance of the 2024 election. As Marist notes: “34% of Americans express little or no confidence in their state or local government to conduct fair and accurate elections in November, up from 24% previously.”

These figures reflect a dramatic erosion in beliefs that the basic mechanism of democracy is working as it should. That decline cannot be written off as a reflection of global trends. In fact, according to the World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index, confidence in elections in this country has dropped from 37th to 43rd globally.

None of that should be surprising, given the president’s long campaign to convince people that millions of ballots are cast illegally and that elections are rigged. As a Brennan Center for Justice report notes: “The Trump administration has launched a concerted drive to undermine American elections. These moves are unprecedented and in some cases illegal.” The Brennan Center highlights “attacks on democratic institutions, the repeal and withdrawal of voter protections, and symbolic or demonstrative moves”.

“A clear pattern,” it observes, “suggests a growing effort.”

Typical was what Trump told an interviewer in the run-up to the 2024 election. “We have a rigged election. We have … very bad elections. We have a bad voting system. We have mail-in ballots.”

The declines registered in this month’s Marist poll suggest that his message is gaining traction.

And the debate over the Save Act doesn’t help, with Republicans alleging that Democrats are opposing the bill to protect their constituency of fraudulent voters and Democrats arguing that Republicans are engaged in effort to make it hard for millions of Americans to cast their ballots.

Not surprisingly, these partisan differences are reflected in the way Americans think about voting in November.

To start, the Marist poll indicates that waning faith in voting is more pronounced among Democrats and independents than among Republicans. They also have very different views about what constitutes the greatest threat to election integrity, with 41% of Democratic respondents in the Marist poll pointing to the prospect of voter suppression and 57% of Republicans worried about voter fraud.

And in a sign of real trouble, “58% of Americans think it is very likely or likely that people will show up at the polls and be told they are not eligible to vote. 42% believe that is not very likely or not likely at all for this to occur.” Marist reports another big change on this question.

“In January of 2020, 42% of Americans thought this was a real possibility while 53% thought it was not very likely or not very likely at all that voters would show up at the polls and be told they were ineligible.”

The introduction of Save Act and its passage in the House of Representatives last year are signs that we have come a long way since the time, more than 50 years ago, when the federal government put its weight behind efforts to increase voter participation in elections. Recall that the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which authorized “direct federal intervention to enable African Americans to register and vote and banned tactics long designed to keep them from the polls”, passed the Senate by a 70-19 margin.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson described it as “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield”. LBJ said: “You must register. You must vote.”

“If you do this,” he added, “then you will find, as others have found before you, that the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

Johnson confidently proclaimed: “Today, what is perhaps the last of the legal barriers is tumbling.” Donald Trump seems determined to prove his predecessor wrong.

The Brennan Center describes the change this way: “Federal officials had an important role in countering disinformation and combatting racial discrimination. This federal protection for fair elections may no longer exist.” In fact, what it calls an “unprecedented federal push” to shake Americans’ faith in elections and to curb voting “will place new pressure on American elections”.

With or without the Save Act, that pressure will only increase in the coming months. Those who seek to preserve American democracy have no time to waste in addressing the disturbing changes in the way millions of Americans think about voting and elections.

In this effort, as the Pew Charitable Trust notes: “Local leaders … can perform a tremendous service by acting as validators of the election process. A word from a community leader – a popular mayor, police chief, or religious leader – about the mechanics of voting, the tabulation process, and security measures can go a long way.” But we all have a part to play in reminding our fellow citizens of LBJ’s admonition about the value of the vote.

• Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty