Trump and Republicans Are Leading an Open Assault on Free Elections
The House’s passage of the SAVE Act last week is the culmination of Donald Trump’s election-denial movement, which has pushed hundreds of laws around the country targeting non-existent voter fraud based on Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The SAVE Act — which requires documentary proof of citizenship like a certified birth certificate or passport to register to vote — could disenfranchise tens of millions of voters or prevent them from voting in future elections. The act requires last names on documents like drivers licenses to match those on birth certificates, and could prevent millions of women who have changed their names after being married from registering to vote. The bill must pass the Senate before Trump can sign it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who brought the bill to the floor last week, said at that time the legislation “ensures you gotta have identification, you have to prove your identity, because only U.S. citizens should vote and decide U.S. elections.” He noted that noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, but claimed “there’s no mechanism currently to ensure that [the] law is always followed.”
The legislation is part of a broader attack on Americans’ voting rights. On March 25, Trump signed an executive order that sought to require the same proof of citizenship as the SAVE Act, would effectively eliminate voting machines and drastically reduce mail-in and absentee ballots, and calls for bogus Republican investigations of voter fraud. Republicans in state legislatures have introduced more than 2,000 election-related bills since legislative sessions began in January. Across the country and in Congress, Republicans have worked with key figures in the election-denial movement as it has gone from a fringe right-wing belief to a key plank of the Trump-led GOP. Last week, they rejoiced together.
“I’m proud to work with my friend Cleta Mitchell, who had a significant hand in what we’re doing here,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Thursday before House Republicans voted to approve the SAVE Act.
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Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results, is head of the Election Integrity Network (EIN), which has become one the most influential organizations in supporting Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud. She and members of EIN were in the gallery when the House voted to pass the SAVE Act on a nearly-party line vote. Four Democrats joined House Republicans in approving the legislation, which the Brennan Center and other pro-democracy groups have warned could prevent 21 million Americans — many who are poor or minorities without access to certified birth certificates, passports, or other necessary documents — from voting in future elections.
“The House has just passed one of the worst pieces of voting legislation in American history. The Senate must stop it,” Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center, said in a statement. “The SAVE Act would put voting out of reach for millions of American citizens. It should not become law.”
The SAVE Act, Trump’s executive order (titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”), and the more than 2,000 bills across the country are largely based on conservatives’ false claims about widespread voter fraud, including by undocumented immigrants, neither of which have ever been proven to occur in any significant manner.
In virtually all aspects of Republican attempts to change the rules and functions of election administration, the election-denial movement’s fingerprints — and those of more mainstream conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — are visible, including on Trump’s executive order.
The order contains many of the demands of the election-denial movement, including an attempt to force states to do away with voting machines and conduct elections only with paper ballots; robust restrictions on mail-in and absentee ballots; and calls for Trump’s Justice Department, Homeland Security, and even Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access voter information to find nonexistent widespread voter fraud and pursue politically-motivated prosecutions of state and local election officials.
In December, Mitchell led a panel at a meeting hosted by ALEC, the watchdog group Documented reported. One of the outcomes of the gathering was the drafting of a document called the U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights. The document called for many of the provisions included in Trump’s order. At the top of the list of demands was requiring “documentary proof of citizenship” in order to register to vote — an idea that’s one step closer to being codified into law after the House’s passing of the SAVE Act.
Max Flugrath of the voting rights group Fair Fight tells Rolling Stone and American Doom that the requirement to have a certified birth certificate or passport to register to vote has roots in the Jim Crow South.
“It’s a modern poll tax designed to silence Black, young, and working Americans. Forget dog whistles — this is a siren,” Flugrath says. “They’re telling us they’ll rig the system to win, no matter how many Americans they silence.”
The SAVE Act enacts policies that the election-denial movement has been calling for for years, while Trump’s executive order is an attempt to force states to comply with its provisions under threat of withholding federal funding for elections or prosecution from the Justice Department and other agencies. Trump’s executive order would also make every voting machine currently in use in the country obsolete, and is based on election-denial conspiracies that the machines are susceptible to hacking and fraud.
The order appears to have been, in large part, a back door to the SAVE Act. Its key provision was a requirement of documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which the SAVE Act accomplished. But Trump’s executive order is also part of the president’s aggressive attempts to expand his constitutional power by attempting to dictate to states how to run elections.
Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner last week, Trump expanded on what legal experts have said is the blatant unconstitutionality of his executive order.
Individual “states are just an agent of the federal government,” Trump said, adding that Republicans should “demand paper ballots” (meaning an end to voting machines) and “one-day elections” (meaning an end to early, absentee, and mail-in voting). These are two of the most important election changes sought by Mitchell and the election-denial movement.
These goals — doing away with voting machines, ending mail-in and absentee voting, and only allowing votes to be counted on a single Election Day — are in line with the provisions in Trump’s order, the SAVE Act, and scores of bills across the country.
All are based on the myth of widespread voting, and especially illegal voting by undocumented immigrants, says Rob Weiner, a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer who is now a director at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Trump and Republicans have used claims of widespread voter fraud — which has never been proven to affect the outcome of any major election — and voting by undocumented immigrants to make it more difficult to register to vote, restrict access to non-Election Day voting, and purge millions of people from voter rolls under questionable claims about ineligibility.
There “is the notion that there is a problem with people who are voting who are not citizens. That’s just not the case. It is an exceedingly rare event,” Weiner tells Rolling Stone and American Doom.
THE TRIO OF Republican efforts to change election rules and laws — the SAVE Act, Trump’s executive order, and the 2,000-plus bills introduced by state GOP lawmakers — are merely attempts to call future elections into question or rig them in favor of conservatives, pro-democracy groups say. All three efforts have been in the works for years.
“They think that by controlling the process that they’re going to control all of society,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “What they don’t understand is that this society is much more diverse and complex than any other society that has fallen to autocracy, so we’re not going down like that.”
Following Trump’s loss in 2020, election deniers took over local election boards and won seats in state legislatures, pushing measures that would support his claims of widespread voter fraud and, in their minds, stop it from happening again. Many of those efforts were successful; some were not.
The trend continued in 2023 and 2024, with state legislatures introducing thousands of bills aimed at curbing voter fraud — efforts that critics say are simply voter suppression laws. In the final weeks and months of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump-aligned groups and the Republican National Committee filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to purge millions from the voter rolls, on the false basis that noncitizens had registered to vote, and stop the counting of mail-in and absentee ballots.
Following Trump’s win in November, Republicans have only doubled down.
So far this year, Republicans in state legislatures have introduced more than 2,000 bills related to election administration, voting rules, and voter registration — already surpassing the total number of election-related bills in 2022 and nearing the total for 2023 and 2024, according to Ballotpedia. In 2024 and so far this year, lawmakers in 21 states have introduced measures requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, with three states — New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Louisiana — passing such legislation.
These efforts, taken together, could create a chaotic election period for next year’s midterms in which the rules of the election are still being debated in statehouses and courtrooms across the country as votes are being tallied.
Combined with the possible disenfranchisement of tens of millions of voters thanks to the SAVE Act, plus Trump’s executive order that seeks to make every voting machine currently in use in the country obsolete, last week’s win by House Republicans and the election-denial movement could be just the beginning of sustained electoral turmoil.
If the Senate passes the SAVE Act, it will be up to states to enforce the law’s key provision of requiring documentary proof of citizenship to vote. States will also have to decide whether to comply with the demands of Trump’s executive order.
If states do comply — or pass laws that mandate some of the order’s demands — it would throw election administration into disarray, according to Larry Norden, vice president of elections and government for the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.
Norden and others warn about provisions in the executive order that call for the decertification of many voting machines in use across the country, to be replaced by machines that comply with new guidelines. Those machines have not yet been constructed by any manufacturers, meaning states that seek to comply with the new guidelines in Trump’s order might have to switch to hand-counted paper ballots in future elections. This would slow the processing of results and add more fuel to the fire of an election-denial movement that claims vote-counting is rife with fraud, Norden and others say.
“They would have to buy systems that aren’t on the market, which they can’t do, so they’d have to hand-count ballots, which would cause all kinds of chaos in an election,” Norden tells Rolling Stone and American Doom.
Currently, 11 states have laws that require their election equipment to comply with what’s called the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidlines 1.0 (VVSG). Trump’s order demands that states comply with the new version of those guidelines, VVSG 2.0, for election equipment like voting machines.
Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting, which advocates for secure election technology, notes that there are currently no voting machines on the market that comply with VVSG 2.0.
“It is possible to interpret this EO as an attempt to fulfill the fantasies of election deniers by basically abolishing all existing voting systems and requiring all hand-counts,” Lindeman tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “Encouragingly, no state has passed a bill that requires impossible voting systems.”
Completely eliminating voting machines has been at the top of the list of priorities for the election-denial movement since 2020. Trump and others have spread conspiracies that voting machines are susceptible to hacking and fraud. At a Cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, Trump said “We have to go back to paper ballots.”
“I wish the governors would do it, because the paper ballots will cost” less than machines, Trump said.
At a Cabinet meeting last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that she has found evidence of fraud related to voting machines.
“We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time, and vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the results of the votes being cast, which further drives forward your mandate to bring about paper ballots across the country so that voters can have faith in the integrity of our elections,” Gabbard told Trump.
TRUMP’S ORDER ALSO requires the Justice Department and DHS to prosecute state and local election officials for not complying with the order’s demands, would withhold federal funds to states for elections, and gives agencies and DOGE access to private voter information on state voter rolls.
“The attorney general shall take all appropriate action to align the Department of Justice’s litigation positions with the purpose and policy of this order,” the order states.
Prosecution of local election officials is part of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025, which has served as a playbook for Trump’s second presidency. Project 2025 proposes using a portion of U.S. code — Section 241, known as “conspiracy against rights” — to prosecute state and local election officials who follow state election laws that conflict with federal law. The law was first used to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan who were attempting to prevent freed slaves from voting.
Gene Hamilton, a former lawyer in Trump’s first administration who is now at the White House, wrote in Project 2025 that the law should be used by the Trump administration to punish election officials who don’t run elections in the exact manner prescribed by Republicans.
Hamilton complained in the document that the Justice Department’s Criminal Division had “ceded substantial discretion concerning voter suppression to the Civil Rights Division.”
“This is a mistake,” Hamilton wrote. “Only by moving authority for 18 U.S. Code § 241 investigations and prosecutions back to the Criminal Division will the rule of law be appropriately enforced.”
Trump’s executive order seeks to implement similar policies to those outlined by Hamilton in Project 2025, requiring the Justice Department and DHS to sue election officials who don’t hand over records the agencies demand, and even giving subpoena power to DOGE in order to find ineligible voters on voter rolls. The order also calls for the Social Security Administration to share Americans’ personal information with the DOJ and DHS in the Trump administration’s attempt to prove widespread voter fraud exists.
Already, a Musk ally working for DOGE, Antonio Gracias, has used SSA data to propagate false conspiracies about widespread voting by undocumented immigrants.
In the first Trump administration, the president’s Commission on Election Integrity failed to find any evidence of widespread voter fraud and was disbanded within a year of Trump taking office. Similar to last month’s executive order, the commission had demanded voter registration information from state election officials — who largely rebuffed the demands, according to Weiner of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
“This is sort of a reprise of that commission, and I don’t think that states will be any more anxious to provide all this information,” Weiner tells Rolling Stone and American Doom.
Weiner, Norden, and others say that Trump’s executive order is obviously unconstitutional. Norden says it is simply “an unlawful power grab,” pointing to Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which makes it very clear that elections are the purview of the states or Congress, not the president.
“The Constitution is pretty clear about who runs our elections — and it’s the states,” Norden tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “Congress has some power, but the president is not mentioned at all when it comes to elections in the constitution and I think that was very deliberate.”
MEANWHILE, REPUBLICAN-LED states continue to aggressively pursue election-denial legislative priorities. In Michigan, the state chapter of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has pushed state legislators to introduce a constitutional amendment requiring documentary proof of citizenship, two voting-rights advocates tell Rolling Stone and American Doom. Elsewhere, Republicans are trying to eliminate or limit early-voting locations, enact mass purges of voters from rolls under specious ineligibility claims, and drastically reduce mail-in voting.
In North Carolina, the state’s Supreme Court has thrown out thousands of votes that were counted after Election Day as part of a bid to reverse the results of an election for a seat on the court itself. Jefferson Griffin, who is seeking to overturn his election loss to Judge Allison Riggs, has argued that 65,000 votes shouldn’t be counted because they didn’t comply with new voter ID requirements.
The implementation of more strict voter ID rules and laws; the targeting of mail-in voting, drop boxes, voting machines; and voter roll purges are just some aspects of Republican efforts to change election administration. In 16 of the 23 states that allow ballot measures, Republican lawmakers are trying to make it more difficult for voters to get voter referendums on the ballot, says Kelly Hall of the Fairness Project, which has been tracking ballot measure laws. Those efforts follow successful ballot measures to protect abortion rights in several red states.
“What they’re saying is, ‘We care so little that we want to undo what you voted on and make it harder for you to do it in the future,’” Hall tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “It’s one of the purest forms of disdain for direct democracy, and it’s pure, unadulterated hypocrisy. ‘We want to get our way regardless of what the public votes for’ is what we’re hearing from political leaders.”
Republican lawmakers in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington state have introduced 151 bills in 2025 alone that would make it more difficult to enact ballot measures, according to Hall.
“The level of overreach they’re comfortable with is completely inconsistent with their views on other issues,” Hall says of Republicans. “When we see Trump say, ‘I want to send the issue of abortion to the states,’ at the least, what you would expect is that the politicians in power would respect voters’ decisions on the issue.”
With the SAVE Act now closer to becoming federal law, and as red states introduce and pass scores of voter suppression laws, the Trump administration has also been gutting election security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which protects election systems and infrastructure like power grids from cyber attacks.
On March 27, the agency’s former leader warned at a forum hosted by the bipartisan election integrity group Keep Our Republic that the Trump administration’s dismantling of CISA increases the risk of foreign interference in elections.
At Keep Our Republic’s recent online meeting, former CISA lead Suzanne Spaulding, warned that the Trump administration’s gutting of the agency is setting the stage for unfettered foreign influence in future elections.
“The robust efforts at foreign interference continue, from Russia, from China, from Iran, from others — it was documented, well documented, by the intelligence community, by CISA, by the FBI, by private sector companies who have visibility, like Microsoft,” said Spaulding, who served as a DHS undersecretary for CISA under President Biden among other executive branch positions across Republican and Democrat administrations. “It is no longer really being monitored, analyzed, or countered by those entities, as far as we can tell.”