Trump wants Republicans to ‘take over’ elections. Maria Cantwell fears their ‘SAVE America Act’ could do that.

WASHINGTON – After finishing a close second in a state considered key to winning the presidency, Donald Trump claimed on social media that his opponent had “illegally cheated” and said the results should be nullified because the winner had committed “fraud.”

It was February 2016. Trump had lost the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who joked in response – somewhat presciently – that if Republicans elected the real estate scion and reality TV host as president, he was liable to go to war with Denmark. After Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote in November 2016, he claimed without providing evidence, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

A decade later, President Trump has made his continued claims about election fraud a centerpiece of his political identity. He told members of Congress in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that his top legislative priority is the “SAVE America Act,” a bill that would make sweeping changes to the way Americans vote.

“The cheating is rampant in our elections,” Trump said. “It’s rampant. It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID. All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote. And no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel.”

House Republicans voted unanimously to pass the bill Feb. 11 – which wouldn’t ban mail-in voting, despite Trump demanding it – even after some Northwest GOP lawmakers said they were not sure how it could be implemented or how many noncitizens have actually voted illegally.

It is already illegal – and extraordinarily rare – for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, maintains a voter fraud database that shows just 99 cases of illegal voting by noncitizens between 1982 and 2025, including zero in either Washington or Idaho. Heritage counts 1,620 total cases of voter fraud nationwide during that period.

That has not stopped the Trump administration or Republicans in Congress from getting behind a bill that would require state and local election officials to overhaul the way Americans vote – just months before high-stakes midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and what Trump can accomplish in the second half of his term. While some see the GOP legislation merely as a political messaging exercise, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in an interview Tuesday she thinks Senate Republicans are serious about passing it.

“I actually think there’s a high chance that they could try to do this,” Cantwell said. “If you really push back and tell them all the flaws, I think it makes it a lot harder, because then they’re really acknowledging how flawed the bill is and still voting for it. But if you don’t do that, I think there is a chance that they’re going to say, ‘Nobody’s paying attention, and so let’s just do it.’ ”

In a podcast appearance on Feb. 2, Trump told his former deputy FBI director, Dan Bongino, that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize the voting.” Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives states the power to choose the time, place and manner of elections, while letting Congress regulate voting nationwide.

Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans – even most Democratic voters – like the idea of requiring ID to vote. Republicans see the issue as a political winner, while they conflate ID requirements with proof of citizenship, which polls show fewer Americans support. But election officials say the GOP bill would be difficult or even impossible to implement by Election Day.

The SAVE America Act would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, when they register to vote. Critics point out that only about half of Americans have a passport and millions of voters, mostly women who changed their name when they got married, have birth certificates that don’t match their current names. That requirement would apply anytime someone moves or updates their registration for another reason.

The legislation also requires photo ID every time a voter casts a ballot, rather than other proof of identity such as the signature-based system currently used in Washington. States would have to run their voter rolls through a Department of Homeland Security database to check for noncitizens.

Election workers would face up to five years in prison if they register a voter without proof of citizenship, even if that voter is a citizen. The bill wouldn’t ban mail-in voting, which Washington and several other states use almost exclusively, but it would effectively eliminate registration by mail and would require voters to include a photocopy of a valid ID with their mail-in ballot.

All of the bill’s provisions would take effect immediately, which means the state and local officials who administer elections across the country could have little time to comply with the law before Election Day, Nov. 3.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a relative moderate, threw her support behind the SAVE America Act on Feb. 16, becoming the 50th GOP senator to support it. Trump and his allies in Congress have called for changes to the Senate filibuster rule that would let Republicans pass the bill with a 51-vote majority, with Vice President JD Vance potentially casting a tie-breaking vote.

Cantwell said those developments motivated her to push back more publicly on the legislation. She brought Washington’s top elections official, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, to the Capitol on Tuesday as her guest for the State of the Union to highlight a bill that Hobbs said “would be very difficult to implement.”

“It would take a lot of time, it would take a lot of money to do that,” said Hobbs, a Democrat. “We would definitely sue. We’re just not going to lie down on this.”

Hobbs said if the Trump administration is serious about making U.S. elections secure, it should restore funding and other support for state election officials it has cut, including at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. His predecessor, Republican Kim Wyman, worked at CISA until July 2023 after stepping down as Washington’s secretary of state in 2021.

After Clark County in southwest Washington was hit with a cyberattack in 2023, Hobbs said, the federal government played a vital role in the state’s response.

Most Democrats in Congress oppose requiring ID to vote or proof of citizenship to register because they say it would make it harder to vote for no good reason.

“As a Democrat, I have always felt it is really important that we allow everyone the ability easily to vote,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said in a brief interview Thursday. “And of course you have to prove who you are. That’s not a question in anybody’s mind, but limiting that access is what I adamantly object to.”

Democrats have often accused Republicans of pushing voter ID laws to suppress Democratic votes, although the political realignment that has taken place in the United States since Trump was first elected in 2016 means the GOP bill may actually disenfranchise more Republican voters.

At a news conference in Arizona on Feb. 13, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Congress must pass the SAVE America Act “to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Although the House passed the bill with unanimous Republican support, it faces a tougher path to passage in the Senate, where Republicans have a 53-47 majority but the filibuster rule requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Wednesday that GOP senators were divided on the prospect of changing Senate rules to a “talking filibuster,” which would force Democrats to speak on the Senate floor to delay a vote on the bill, rather than simply objecting to a simple majority vote as current rules allow.

That change would let Republicans pass the bill with just 51 votes, but it would also let Democrats delay other GOP priorities – and it could backfire on Republicans next time they are in the minority. Thune told Fox News on Wednesday he plans to hold a vote on the bill, even if he does not have the votes to pass it.

“It is a stark contrast between Republicans and Democrats about how they want to handle elections in this country,” Thune said. “And this is going to put them, I think, in a very difficult position. It’s an issue, if I were running as a Democrat in the midterm elections in November, I wouldn’t want to have to defend.”

When Democrats last had the House majority, they passed a sweeping election reform bill of their own, called the For the People Act, which sought to ban voter ID requirements, restrict gerrymandering, limit political spending and much more. Like the Republicans’ bill, the Democrats’ proposal was entirely partisan and election officials warned that some of its provisions were poorly written and would be virtually impossible to implement.

Congress has not passed major bipartisan election reform legislation since the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which came partly in response to the controversial conclusion of the 2000 presidential election. That bill modernized and standardized voting processes while still giving states wide latitude to run elections.

Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said in a brief interview on Thursday that although he supports the SAVE America Act, he was not ready to take a position on changing filibuster rules to pass it, “Because the votes aren’t there.”

His fellow Idaho Republican, Sen. Mike Crapo, said in a statement that he agrees with Risch that there are not enough votes to change the filibuster rules. Both Idaho senators are co-sponsors of the bill.

In comparison to other modern presidents, Trump has not asked Congress to do much, with the exception of the massive tax-and-spending package – the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – that Republicans passed in July.

Congressional action is the only way Republicans could change voting processes before Election Day. The Washington Post reported Thursday that pro-Trump activists have been encouraging the president to sign an executive order that would claim China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency and give himself extraordinary power over voting across the country.

A declassified 2021 intelligence report concluded that China’s government considered efforts to influence the 2020 election but did not go through with them. Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday he could not discuss potential Chinese interference in U.S. elections because any such information would be classified.

In response to the Post’s reporting on the executive order, Cantwell said in a statement, “President Trump can’t seize control of or interfere in our elections.”

“The Constitution is absolutely clear: states administer our elections, which is why the courts blocked Trump’s earlier executive order banning mail-in voting and demanding citizens’ data,” she said. “President Trump has no authority to make an end run around the Constitution.”

Thune has said he plans to bring the SAVE America Act to the Senate floor for a vote, but he first wants to resolve the impasse that has led to a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Murray, Cantwell and other Senate Democrats have refused to vote for that funding until the Trump administration agrees to rein in its immigration crackdown in the wake of the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents in January.