Booths await voters at the Pennington County Administration Building during early voting on January 19, 2026 for a municipal election in Rapid City, South Dakota. (Photo by Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight)
The U.S. Senate’s voting reform measure began debating on Tuesday A group of voting rights activists and election officials say this would create major headaches for underfunded state and local election officials without effectively stopping fraud.
The so-called SAVE America Act, which President Donald Trump is relentlessly pushing, would create chaos for state and local election administrators by immediately imposing several modern requirements without providing additional funding, former North Carolina elections director Karen Brinson Bell said Tuesday in a news conference organized by Washington U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell.
“I cannot overstate the Herculean effort that the SAVE America Act would represent for election officials across the country,” said Brinson Bell, who now advises election officials as co-founder of the group Advance Elections. “Please do not set our country or these public servants up for failure. Bring us to the table. Develop this legislation properly and provide adequate funding and resources so we can all succeed.”
No modern money
The bill would initially impose $35 million in costs for Washington state to administer this year’s midterm elections, Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey said. The measure would cost the state’s election administrators an estimated additional $12 million a year in presidential election years, he added.
However, it would not provide federal funding to states and localities to cover the modern costs.
“When I looked at the SAVE America Act to understand how it would impact election administration, I put a check-F on the dollar sign and didn’t see a single dollar, let alone the hundreds of millions needed to implement these changes,” Brinson Bell said.
The bill, which Trump and other advocates say is necessary to stop immigrants from voting, would require proof of citizenship to register as a voter. They would also have to show photo ID at polling stations.
But the measure “is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem,” Kimsey said on the call Tuesday. Non-citizens participating in federal elections are extremely uncommon.
Obstacles to postal voting
Overall, the bill would make voting more complex, particularly for people who have changed their names, tribal citizens and those without photo ID, participants on the call said. This contradicts the goal of the election workers: to make voting easier.
“The problem isn’t that the wrong people are voting,” Kimsey said. “The problem is that not enough people are voting.”
The bill would also create barriers to mail-in voting that Washington and other states have used for decades.
The system has increased voter turnout and is popular across party lines.
“Washington state’s absentee voting system is such a strong system,” Cantwell said. “The whole country should move more towards it and not away from it.”
Integrity in voting
The bill’s supporters, including most Republicans in Congress, say it would establish common-sense safeguards to protect U.S. elections.
In a speech Tuesday kicking off debate on the measure, U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune called it “essential.”
“If there is anything essential to the integrity of elections, it is ensuring that those who have registered to vote are eligible to vote – and that those who show up at the polls to vote … are who they say they are,” said Thune, a Republican from South Dakota.
The way to achieve this is to require proof of citizenship and photo ID, he added.
But photo IDs are not as universal as commonly believed, said Chrissy Hart, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Maine.
Eighteen percent of citizens over 65 do not have a photo ID, as do 16 percent of Latino voters, 25 percent of black voters and 15 percent of low-income Americans, Hart said.
Refusal to vote
Kimsey, who identified as a Republican when he first ran for office in 1998 and became an independent after the pro-Trump mafia stormed the US Capitol after the 2020 election, was asked whether the measure was a continuation of Trump’s efforts to undermine US elections.
He responded that what he called the “election denial movement” lost momentum after Trump’s victory in 2024, but that it appeared to be resurfacing ahead of the midterm elections.
“In my view, this is nothing more than a very clumsy — and I hope not effective — but very clumsy attempt to create chaos in this year’s midterm elections,” he said.
