The ‘SAVE America Act’ has brought Congress to a halt. Local election officials say it’s an unworkable bill
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has made it clear his top legislative priority is the “SAVE America Act,” a bill that would impose new restrictions on the way Americans vote this November.
The bill is so important to enact before Election Day, the president and his allies say, that they have blocked other major legislation and brought Congress largely to a halt to pressure reluctant GOP senators to pass it. But as lawmakers return to the Capitol with House Republicans planning to take up the bill again this week, local election officials across the Inland Northwest – most of them Republicans – say it is unnecessary, unworkable and would cause chaos if it becomes law.
“It’s a solution in search of a problem, but it’s also creating more problems that I think are going to hurt our country in the long run,” said Trent Tripple, Ada County clerk and vice president of the Idaho Association of County Recorders and Clerks.
In April 2025, House Republicans passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and would subject election workers to criminal penalties if they help a voter register without that proof. After GOP senators declined to change the filibuster rule to pass it with a simple majority vote, the House bill’s authors rebranded it as the SAVE America Act and passed it again in February, this time with a provision requiring ID to vote.
Trump, who for years has claimed without evidence that noncitizens vote illegally on a massive scale, has asked congressional Republicans to revise the bill again to ban mail-in voting with certain exceptions, plus unrelated measures related to transgender people. In a speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, the president said passing the bill would guarantee victory for Republicans in November and for many elections to come.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid and unwise,” Trump said. “But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”
Tripple, a Republican who returned home to Idaho after 20 years as an Air Force fighter pilot, said state law already requires voters to show ID or sign an affidavit when they vote. In Washington, where elections are conducted entirely by mail, each voter’s registration is automatically updated from a database shared with the Department of Licensing, and identity is verified by signature.
“If we catch anybody lying or doing anything wrong, then we prosecute them,” Tripple said, adding that voter fraud does happen but isn’t widespread. “But to suggest that this problem rises to the level of completely overhauling how we do things is just absolutely asinine and ridiculous.”
The SAVE America Act has the hallmarks of a classic “messaging bill,” designed not to become law but to make members of the opposing party take politically risky votes in an election year. But the president and his closest allies at the Capitol have treated it as something Congress must pass, stopping other legislation until it does and forcing the GOP leaders of the House and Senate to send lawmakers home early for the Independence Day recess that ends Monday.
After blocking the renewal of a key foreign surveillance power and withholding his nominee to fill the nation’s top intelligence job until Congress passed the voting bill, Trump refused to sign a landmark bipartisan housing bill on June 29 for the same reason, calling the effort to lower housing costs “a big yawn” compared to his No. 1 priority. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who introduced legislation in 2025 to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore, effectively shut down the House on June 30 after demanding that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., attach the SAVE America Act to an unrelated defense policy bill.
In interviews and emails, eight county officials responsible for running elections in Idaho and Washington state told The Spokesman-Review they have serious concerns about the voting bill, despite some of them supporting stricter voter ID requirements and other reforms – but only if Congress provided the necessary time and money to implement them. One county clerk in Idaho said she supports the SAVE America Act.
“My general frustration with legislators, at both the federal and state level, is that the concept people never talk to the boots-on-the-ground folks,” said Heather Jobe, a Republican who serves as Klickitat County auditor. “If legislators would ever talk to the people who do the things they legislate about, it might save us all some headache.”
It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections. A database of confirmed voter fraud cases maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, shows exactly 100 cases of attempted voting by noncitizens nationwide since 1982, with none of those cases in either Washington or Idaho.
A review of Idaho’s voter rolls in 2024 prompted by an executive order signed by Gov. Brad Little, R-Idaho, resulted in charges against one man, Tino Hermann Kleiss, for registering and voting as a noncitizen.
Tripple, whose team helped investigate that case in Ada County, said the fact that the review by Secretary of State Phil McGrane had found just one case in more than 1 million registered Idaho voters speaks to the rarity of illegal voting by noncitizens. He said Kleiss had been brought to the United States as a child and thought he was a U.S. citizen.
A spokeswoman for McGrane, a Republican, declined to answer specific questions about how Idaho would implement the bill if it becomes law, calling them “hypothetical scenarios.”
“Although the SAVE America Act is receiving significant attention in the national media, we believe there is little chance it will pass, so we will hold off on discussing potential outcomes,” the spokeswoman, Chelsea Bishop, wrote in an email.
Will Hutchens, the nonpartisan auditor of Columbia County, Washington, said that when it comes to fraudulent voting by noncitizens, “The facts on the ground do not match the rhetoric.”
“There’s just not a lot of incentive for noncitizens to attempt to vote,” Hutchens said. “And I think the numbers bear that out. If you’re going to break the law, you would want a bigger prize, right?”
Alesia “Lisa” Winner, the Republican clerk of Lewis County, Idaho, said requiring proof of citizenship could prevent otherwise eligible voters from casting their ballots.
“My concern would be disenfranchising voters before a big election coming up in November, if they make it effective immediately, due to the elderly population that may have trouble getting those things like a passport or birth certificate,” Winner said.
Large numbers of college students and other voters who move often could be affected by the proof-of-citizenship mandate when they update their registration. People whose current names don’t match their birth certificate – notably, married women – may need additional documents.
Marianne Nichols, the Republican auditor of Pend Oreille County, said many women were frustrated when they had to request and pay for those documents to update their driver’s licenses to meet the long-delayed requirements of the federal REAL ID Act in 2025.
“There’s so many steps that they have to go through,” she said. “And it does cost extra money and it does cost that time, so that’s one of my big concerns.”
The legislation suggests a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license as one option to prove citizenship, but states allow lawful permanent residents and other noncitizens to get those licenses, so they don’t constitute proof of citizenship. Washington is one of just five states that offer “enhanced” licenses that do prove citizenship, but not every citizen in the state has one.
It’s already illegal for election workers to knowingly violate election laws, but the SAVE America Act would impose new federal criminal penalties if they don’t correctly verify a voter’s citizenship – even if that voter is a citizen.
Winner said that threat would dissuade people from filling roles that are essential to running elections – roles that have already faced increased pressure in recent years. Jobe, Tripple, Hutchens, Republican Boundary County Clerk Glenda Poston and nonpartisan Douglas County Auditor Thad Duvall agreed.
“If you’re going to impose penalties on poll workers, you’re going to have a mass exodus of poll workers,” Winner said. “And then what are we going to do?”
That impact could be especially acute in Idaho, Tripple said, because the state’s in-person voting relies on recruiting large numbers of short-term poll workers, most of whom are retirees. Idaho law allows voters to register when they vote on Election Day, putting the potential burden of verifying citizenship on those workers, not experts.
In addition to the threat of being charged with federal crimes, election workers could also be sued in civil court through a “private right of action” the bill would create. Tripple said that represents a dangerous overreach by the federal government.
“If I found anybody in my state that was knowingly breaking the law, we would go after them,” he said. “What I don’t want is the federal government now to have a blank card, whether it’s a Republican or Democratic administration, to be able to come into a state and start going after people just because they’re doing things differently and they disagree with them.”
The U.S. Constitution gives states the power to decide the “times, places and manner” of holding federal elections, while letting Congress create nationwide election laws. The last bipartisan overhaul of U.S. election law was the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which addressed problems and mistrust that emerged from the historically close 2000 presidential race.
Julie Fry, the Republican clerk of Latah County in Idaho, disagreed with her fellow election officials, saying she supports the SAVE America Act and thinks it could restore Americans’ faith in the country’s voting systems.
“We’ve lost so much trust in our election process, I think we need to do a pretty hardcore reset so that people can once again trust elections,” she said.
Jobe said mistrust in elections seems more pronounced among Republicans in her county since the 2020 election, when Trump insisted he won despite producing no evidence of fraud on the scale that would have changed the outcome.
“I think the far right is equally as deluded and dangerous as the far left. Most of us live in a world that’s somewhere in the middle, and that’s really where people get things done. I have tried ad nauseam to get people to come in and watch the process and get educated and ask questions. And I think that’s where my biggest frustration lies, that we as human beings seek facts that support our truths, you don’t necessarily seek the truth.”
When she ran for auditor in 2022 while saying she trusted Washington’s election system, Jobe said, a fellow Republican in the area “basically insinuated that I was a communist and I was trying to ruin democracy one small town at a time, because no self-respecting Republican would say that elections were secure.”
Fry said she thinks Idaho could comply easily with the Republicans’ bill, but she acknowledged that wouldn’t be the case for some other states.
“I can’t even fathom what it would do to the state of Washington,” Fry said. “It would be a disaster for them, but I personally think their elections need to be cleaned up over there anyway.”
The bill’s proponents have emphasized the provision requiring ID to vote, which polls suggest most Americans find reasonable. Tripple said that would be relatively easy for Idaho, which already requires voters to show ID when they vote or request an absentee ballot in the mail, which any Idaho voter may do with no excuse needed.
Stuart Holmes, Washington’s director of elections, said his state already has a rigorous system to verify each voter’s identity. But the federal bill’s ID requirement would force the Washington Secretary of State’s Office and county auditors to completely redesign the ballot packet mailed to voters, he said, requiring time and money the SAVE America Act doesn’t provide.
Holmes, who helped run elections in Benton County before taking the statewide role, said Washington voters would need to enclose a photocopy of their ID with their ballot, but outside the ballot envelope. That’s because state law protects voters’ identity and bars election workers from opening a ballot before verifying the voter’s signature – or ID, if that were required.
The version of the bill that passed the House in February wouldn’t ban mail-in voting, but Trump has demanded that Congress eliminate the practice with exceptions for Americans traveling or stationed abroad in the military, or those with illnesses or disabilities. That would upend Washington’s entire election system and Idaho’s no-excuse absentee ballot option.
“I am absolutely against mail-in voting restrictions, because that also disenfranchises voters,” Winner said. “I believe Idaho has a very secure election process and have full faith that eligible voters are allowed to vote and noneligible voters are not falling though the cracks.”
Nichols said her small team in Pend Oreille County is installing more secure ballot drop boxes and developing contingency plans to conduct the November election in case vote-by-mail is not an option, either because Congress passes Trump’s preferred legislation or because one of the president’s other efforts to restrict mail-in voting succeed – including an executive order Washington is challenging in court and changes to Postal Service policy.
“It really worries me what elections are going to look like for our constituents,” she said. “Everybody thinks we can just go back to polling places really easily, but it’s not that simple. Our laws are not made for that here in Washington state.”
Another problem cited by Holmes and several of the county officials is that the SAVE America Act would require states and counties to make major changes to election procedures without giving them the necessary time or federal funding. The National Association of Counties estimates the cost of implementing the new bill would be more than 11 times higher than running elections under current law.
“We would absolutely need additional funding,” Poston said. “We would have to employ more workers at the polls, because it is going to slow the process down dramatically.”
Small counties like hers, Winner said, “already have enough unfunded mandates as it is.”
Kathy Ackerman, the Republican clerk of Idaho County and her state’s representative on the National Association of Counties board of directors, said that while Idaho is already compliant with parts of the SAVE America Act, other states would need to completely overhaul their election laws and processes.
“I do not know how the significant change these states are facing can be implemented without federal funding and/or adequate time to deploy,” she wrote in an email. “There is a significant disconnect between the rule-makers, the citizens, and the people who are actually doing the work. My concern about rapid deployment is that election administrators, election staff and the army of mostly volunteer poll workers will be facing a public that is angry about change.”
Duvall pointed out that Washington state law requires military and overseas ballots to be mailed 45 days before Election Day, making it virtually impossible for state officials to change election processes after mid-September.
Several of the county officials expressed frustration at overblown rhetoric about voting systems from Democrats, too, and said both parties should work together on sensible improvements to voting policy while restoring trust in elections. When Democrats controlled Congress and the White House in 2021, they tried to pass their own partisan election-reform bill that local officials also said was impossible to implement.
“The problem I have with the political parties right now is that there’s a push to gain or maintain power however they can, and it really has a polarizing effect,” said Duvall, who was elected multiple times as a Democrat before running as a nonpartisan candidate starting in 2022, after he decided he couldn’t align himself with the extremes of either party. “When people lose in the election arena, they immediately try to cast aspersions about the election, and that goes for both parties.”
Nearly all Republicans in Congress have publicly supported the SAVE America Act, including those like Reps. Dan Newhouse and Michael Baumgartner of Washington, who openly reject Trump’s claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election through massive voter fraud. One of the few exceptions is retiring Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who called his party’s effort to pass the bill “theater” in a July 2 interview with the Raleigh News & Observer.
“There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions,” said Tillis, who helped pass a statewide voter ID law as North Carolina’s speaker of the House in 2013. “It’s become a joke, in my mind for somebody that’s actually implemented voter ID law, how anybody can look the American voters in the eye and suggest that it could be implemented in time without just causing a huge impact on the elections, and ironically undermine the confidence of it.”
Tripple said his biggest concern is that efforts to sow mistrust of the nation’s election systems could effectively disenfranchise the next generation of young voters.
“If they don’t feel like their vote matters, then we’re in trouble,” he said. “If we’re not fostering the type of environment where we can have honest conversations and robust debate without getting personal and attacking people, and talking about policies rather than processes, then we’re setting ourselves up for a long period of time when the country is going to be teetering on disaster.”
Orion Donovan Smith can be reached at 202-853-2524 or at orionds@spokesman.com.