SAVE America Act would require Washingtonians to mail photocopies of official IDs with ballot to vote

WASHINGTON – A controversial election-reform bill backed by President Donald Trump would cost Washington state taxpayers at least $35 million to implement but wouldn’t provide federal funding to cover those costs, according to a new report from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office.

The Washington Democrat’s report uses data from the state Secretary of State’s Office to argue that the SAVE America Act would create an “unfunded mandate” for states while sowing chaos ahead of November’s midterm elections – all in the name of Trump’s unproven claims of rampant voter fraud.

The bill has stalled in the Senate since House Republicans passed it Feb. 11, but its prospects of becoming law improved this week as Idaho’s GOP senators both said they support changing Senate rules to pass it. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Tuesday he plans to bring the bill to the floor this week.

“This is cost and chaos, unnecessarily – for what? We don’t have a serious problem here,” Cantwell said in an interview Friday. “I’m mad about this. I really am frustrated that my colleagues would put their names on such a product that is about disenfranchising people.”

The legislation, which would go into effect as soon as it passes, requires voters to show photo ID when they cast a ballot and prove they are U.S. citizens each time they register to vote. It would also require states to regularly turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security and would make local election officials subject to criminal penalties or lawsuits by private citizens if they help someone register to vote without proper proof of citizenship, even if that voter is a citizen.

In Washington and other states that rely on mail-in voting, voters would need to include a photocopy of a driver’s license or other acceptable ID in a ballot envelope. To register to vote for the first time – or after any change that requires updating registration, such as moving or changing political parties – they would be required to bring a valid passport, birth certificate matching their current name or other proof of citizenship to an in-person registration site.

Cantwell’s report estimates that Washington state and its 39 counties would need to spend at least $35.7 million before November’s election if the SAVE America Act becomes law, plus another $9.5 million to $14.6 million to run each subsequent election. It warns that election officials could leave their essential jobs because they would face up to five years in jail and $250,000 in fines if they make “an honest mistake about a voter’s paperwork.”

Republicans say the bill is necessary to crack down on massive voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence that such fraud happens on a scale that affects the outcome of elections, and point to polls that show most Americans like the idea of requiring ID to vote. The GOP-controlled Senate is set to take up the bill this week and Trump has said he won’t sign any other bills until senators send the SAVE America Act to his desk, putting pressure on Republicans to scrap the current filibuster rule that effectively requires bipartisan support to pass most legislation.

Nearly every Republican in the Senate has signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill, including Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch of Idaho.

Crapo told Idaho radio host Neal Larson on Wednesday he believes Democrats only oppose the GOP bill because they want to be able to cheat in elections. The senator said he supports changing the Senate filibuster rule to let Republicans pass the legislation with only 51 votes, rather than the 60-vote supermajority currently required, even though such a change could let Democrats derail future GOP bills by introducing amendments that force Republicans to take politically risky votes.

Speaking to Larson on Thursday, Risch said he’s “committed to do whatever it takes” to pass the SAVE America Act.

“We don’t have a problem in Idaho – our elections are rock solid,” Risch told the radio host. “But you get places like Chicago or California or Georgia, where fraud is rampant, and we – even though we live in Idaho and don’t have a problem – we have a right to insist that elections in other parts of the country are legitimate.”

Trump has seldom asked Congress to pass any legislation, but he identified the SAVE America Act as his top legislative priority when he delivered his State of the Union address on Feb. 24. Both Crapo and Risch said on Feb. 27 they weren’t ready to support changing the filibuster to pass the election bill, but Risch told Larson on Thursday the president had been “pressuring” senators and had “been a little successful” in recent days.

The most notable reversal came from Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who faces a primary challenge from fellow Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general who has aligned himself with Trump’s demand to scrap the filibuster and pass the bill. The president has so far withheld his endorsement, which could be decisive in the race, and Cornyn changed his position on Wednesday after Paxton said he might drop out if the Senate passes the SAVE America Act.

Washington is one of eight states, plus the District of Columbia, that conduct elections entirely by mail. The bill that passed the House on Feb. 11 wouldn’t ban mail-in voting, but Trump has demanded that GOP senators amend the bill to end the practice with narrow exceptions, a proposal Cantwell called “outrageous.”

“I don’t even know what we would do,” the Washington senator said. “You would decimate our current system. I don’t even know if they could get ready for the November election.”

The bill’s critics point out that states already verify a voter’s identity during registration, that fraudulent voting is extremely rare and that stiff criminal penalties for illegal voting far outweigh any incentive someone may have to cheat. In the interview, Cantwell compared the voter ID requirement to police requiring drivers to show proof of insurance every time they get into a car.

It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in state or federal elections, with violators facing up to five years in prison just for registering illegally, and potential deportation if they try to vote. U.S. citizens who vote fraudulently also face steep penalties, including fines and up to five years in prison under both Washington and Idaho law, with additional penalties for federal elections.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, maintains a nationwide database of election fraud cases. It contains 1,620 cases of voter fraud between 1982 and 2025, including 99 cases of noncitizens trying to vote, none of which happened in either Washington or Idaho.

Among the states Risch accused of “rampant” fraud, California has seen 71 cases of voter fraud in that period, 117 in Illinois and 36 in Georgia over that 43-year period, according to the Heritage database.

If the Republicans’ bill becomes law, its requirements wouldn’t be entirely new to some states. When Arizona voters approved a ballot measure in 2004 to require photo ID to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship to register to vote, Tammy Patrick was running elections for Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than 60% of the state’s population.

Patrick, now chief program officer at the National Association of Election Officials, said that policy took about two years to implement, and even then it caused confusion and disenfranchised voters. Many people who had voted for the proposition came to her office when they realized they didn’t have the required documents to prove citizenship, she said.

“They said, ‘Well, this wasn’t supposed to affect me. I’m an American,’ ” Patrick recalled. “And so I think that there’s this misunderstanding that only those who should not be voting because they’re ineligible will be affected, and that is not true.”

No election official in the country wants ineligible voters to participate in elections and cases of voter fraud are rare, Patrick said, but she worries it will be more common that eligible Americans are disenfranchised if the SAVE America Act becomes law.

“If this was a solution to a problem that was vast, then some might say it’s worth that cost, but the balance is going to shift dramatically to eligible Americans being disenfranchised at the expense of potentially keeping a handful of ineligible voters from participating,” she said.

She added that Washington and other vote-by-mail states already verify voters’ identity and eligibility when they register, and said requiring people to include a photocopied ID in a ballot envelope only needlessly complicates the voting process, especially for people who don’t have easy access to a printer.

“The logistics of handling and managing millions of pieces of paper with individuals’ photocopies of their driver’s licenses is not only onerous, but it is really problematic for how those records are going to be retained, maintained, stored,” Patrick said. “Just the processing of them is a logistic nightmare for local election officials.”

Patrick, who worked with Washington’s Republican former Secretary of State Kim Wyman at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said she worries that the goal of the push to pass the SAVE America Act is “to ensure that this year’s election process is as chaotic as possible.”

“That is unfortunate, because election professionals are standing strong and are preparing for the election under the rules that they’ve been given and the laws that they have to abide by,” she said. “But we continue to see attempts to change the rules of engagement as we head into primaries and into the general election in the fall.”

Republican senators find themselves in a position that mirrors their Democratic counterparts in 2021, when Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House. That year, Cantwell and nearly every Democrat in Congress co-sponsored a sweeping election-reform bill of their own, the For the People Act, that passed the House on a party-line vote and prompted a fight among Democratic senators over changing filibuster rules to pass it amid universal Republican opposition.

At the time, election administrators across the country raised concerns similar to the ones Cantwell’s reports highlight. They said the Democrats’ bill – which would have banned states from enacting voter ID requirements, among dozens of other provisions – created an unfunded mandate that would leave states to foot the bill for dramatic changes that couldn’t realistically be implemented before the next midterm election.

“It might be a fair question, about whether those reforms could have been implemented in time or how long it takes or whatever,” Cantwell said. “But I’m pretty sure I sponsored and do support them, because I think that they are initiatives that do help increase voter participation.”

Sam Reed, a Republican who served as Washington’s secretary of state from 2001 to 2013, said he thinks the authors of both the For the People Act and the SAVE America Act had good intentions, but he warned that “the federal government shouldn’t be micromanaging elections in this nation.”

“I think that’s the way America should work,” the former state elections official said. “This is a federal system. Our Constitution says, at least regarding federal elections, that it’s up the states to determine the process. I think it’s very important that we protect that.”

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives states control over the “times, places and manner” of holding federal elections, while allowing Congress to pass regulations that apply to federal elections. The last time Congress passed a bipartisan election-reform bill was in the wake of the controversial 2000 presidential election.

Reed recalled how he and a bipartisan group of his fellow state elections officials pushed back when Democrats in Congress, angry about George W. Bush’s narrow victory in 2000, tried to impose stricter federal regulations on how states ran elections. They ended up working together to craft the Help America Vote Act of 2003, which modernized voting systems and gave more resources to state and county election officials while letting them run elections as they see fit.

In all his years as a county auditor and secretary of state, Reed said, losing candidates always complained the elections weren’t fair. He pointed to Trump’s lack of complaints about the 2024 election while continuing to claim the 2020 election was rigged as an example of that typical hypocrisy.

Reed lamented that few of his fellow Republicans have been willing to say publicly that Trump lost the 2020 election, and he credited Rep. Michael Baumgartner for being one of the few who have. The Spokane Republican said during a January hearing he believes former President Joe Biden defeated Trump.

“Trust in our election system is fundamental to democracy,” Reed said. “It’s important our leaders in the future focus on developing that trust.”