Golden Age of America

Category: Democracy & the Rule of Law

  • Freedom in America Now Means Showing Your Papers

    On America’s 250th anniversary, Trump demanded new barriers between millions of citizens and the ballot.

    On Saturday night, Donald Trump stood on the National Mall as the country marked 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The setting was built for soaring language about freedom, representative government and the consent of the governed. Instead, Trump used part of his Independence Day address to demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act.

    “All voters must show voter ID,” Trump said. “All voters must provide a little thing called proof of citizenship.”

    He also demanded an end to mail voting except for people who are ill, disabled, deployed with the military or traveling.

    The president celebrated American freedom by proposing that millions of Americans prove, in precisely the manner his government demands, that they are entitled to participate in it.

    The Paperwork Is the Barrier

    The House-passed SAVE America Act would require people registering to vote in federal elections to present documentary proof of citizenship. It would also impose a restrictive national photo identification requirement for casting a ballot and give the Department of Homeland Security access to state voter rolls. Trump has pressed Congress to add his sweeping mail-voting restrictions to that package. Reuters explained the legislation and Trump’s requested additions in March.

    Republicans describe this as a simple request to prove citizenship.

    It is not simple for everyone.

    Research conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice and its partners found that approximately 21.3 million voting-age American citizens do not have documentary proof of citizenship readily available. At least 3.8 million do not have those documents at all because they were lost, stolen, destroyed or never obtained. That is more than 9 percent of voting-age citizens.

    Those people are not noncitizens. They are American citizens whose paperwork is not sitting in a convenient folder waiting for the federal government to demand it.

    Millions of married women have birth certificates bearing a previous name. Younger voters and voters of color are less likely to have ready access to the required documents. The bill’s photo identification rules exclude student IDs and place additional restrictions on many tribal IDs. The Brennan Center found that the requirements would create barriers across age, race and geography.

    The difference between having a right and being able to exercise it is often paperwork, transportation, money and time.

    The SAVE America Act turns those obstacles into federal election policy.

    Kansas Already Tried This

    This is not a theoretical warning.

    Kansas enacted a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration in 2013. The law blocked more than 31,000 eligible American citizens from registering before federal courts struck it down.

    Kansas’s own expert estimated that the requirement prevented essentially zero noncitizens from voting. It still stopped tens of thousands of citizens from registering. The Supreme Court filing opposing Kansas’s appeal describes both the number of citizens affected and the absence of a corresponding fraud problem.

    That is what these laws do in practice. They do not surgically identify fraudulent voters. They create a paperwork checkpoint and reject eligible citizens who cannot pass through it quickly enough.

    The SAVE America Act would take that failed state experiment and scale it nationally.

    Mail Voting Is Not a Loophole

    Trump’s demand would also end broad access to mail voting, preserving it only for a narrow group of approved excuses.

    That would not be a minor adjustment.

    In the 2024 election, 29 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail, representing roughly 48 million people. USAFacts found that mail voting remained one of the three principal ways Americans participated in the election.

    Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct elections primarily by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington. Active registered voters in those jurisdictions ordinarily receive ballots without first proving that they belong to a federally approved exception. The National Conference of State Legislatures documents how those systems operate.

    Trump’s proposal would make the ordinary voting system used by those states unavailable to most of their voters.

    That is not election security. It is the federal government ordering states to replace functioning election systems because the president dislikes the way their citizens vote.

    A Solution in Search of a Problem

    Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal. Registration forms require applicants to affirm their citizenship under penalty of perjury, and states regularly maintain their voter rolls.

    More importantly, audits and investigations repeatedly find that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. The Associated Press reviewed state systems and available data and found isolated cases, not evidence of the widespread problem Republicans claim to be solving.

    The alleged threat is tiny.

    The proposed response would place new barriers between tens of millions of eligible citizens and the ballot.

    In security terms, this is a terrible control. It imposes enormous friction on legitimate users while doing little to address the actual threat. It does not harden the system. It locks people out of it.

    The Same Architecture

    Six days before Trump’s speech, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to discard mail ballots that voters had completed and mailed by Election Day but that the Postal Service delivered afterward.

    Republicans could not persuade the Court to declare those ballots late.

    The administration was already pursuing another route through the Postal Service, proposing new data, barcode and mailing requirements for election offices.

    Then Trump stood on the National Mall and demanded the legislative version: proof-of-citizenship checkpoints, restrictive identification rules and an end to ordinary mail voting.

    Different mechanisms. Same design.

    Centralize control. Add dependencies. Increase the number of points where an eligible voter can be rejected. Call the result security.

    Freedom, With Conditions

    The Declaration of Independence says governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

    Trump’s version comes with conditions.

    You may give that consent if your documents are available. You may give it if the name on your birth certificate matches the name you use today. You may give it if your identification appears on the government’s approved list. You may vote from home only if the federal government considers your reason good enough.

    The United States spent its 250th anniversary celebrating the idea that political power belongs to the people.

    Its president used the occasion to demand that fewer of them be allowed to exercise it.

  • The Ballot Was Mailed on Time. Republicans Wanted It Dead.

    The Supreme Court preserved postmark grace periods. The same day, a federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to turn the Postal Service into a voter-verification checkpoint.

    On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Mississippi may continue counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day if they arrive within five business days

    That sounds obvious because it is obvious. A voter completes and mails a ballot on time. The Postal Service takes longer than expected to deliver it. The ballot still counts.

    The Republican National Committee wanted the Court to pretend that Election Day is not only the deadline for the voter to cast a ballot, but also the deadline for the mail to finish moving it and the election office to physically receive it.

    There was one fairly major problem with that argument.

    Congress never wrote that.

    In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court held that federal laws establishing Election Day determine when voters must make their choice. They do not establish a national ballot-receipt deadline.

    The mail is not instantaneous. The Framers knew this. Anyone who has ever waited four days for a birthday card mailed from the next county also knows this.

    The RNC’s case required everyone else to ignore it.

    What the Court Actually Decided

    Mississippi allows certain absentee voters to mail their ballots by Election Day. Those ballots may still be counted if they arrive within five business days.

    The Fifth Circuit struck down that law, deciding that federal statutes establishing a single Election Day required every ballot to be received by the end of that day.

    The Supreme Court reversed.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented, according to Voting Rights Lab’s summary of the decision.

    The ruling is important, but it is also narrow.

    The Court did not create a constitutional right to a postmark grace period. It did not require every state to accept ballots after Election Day. Congress could still pass a national receipt deadline if it wanted to.

    The Court answered one specific question: Do the federal Election Day statutes already prohibit states from counting ballots that were cast by Election Day but received afterward?

    No.

    The RNC tried to manufacture a receipt deadline that Congress never enacted. It lost.

    Current laws in 14 states and Washington, D.C. allow at least some regular mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive afterward. Thirty states provide some form of grace period for military and overseas ballots.

    Those laws survive.

    Five Days Is Not Five More Days to Vote

    This distinction gets deliberately mangled every time mail voting comes up.

    A postmark grace period does not give people additional days to decide how to vote. It gives the Postal Service additional days to deliver a ballot that was already completed and mailed by the deadline.

    The voter has done what the law required.

    The rest is transit.

    More than 48 million Americans voted by mail in 2024. Different datasets categorize voting methods somewhat differently, but mail ballots accounted for somewhere between 29 and 31 percent of the vote. States United found that 31 percent of Americans voted by mail, while USAFacts, using Census Bureau data, reported 29 percent.

    Either way, this is not a marginal voting method used by twelve people and somebody’s grandmother.

    Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail.

    That included voters from every political party and every kind of community. States United found that roughly one in four rural voters used mail ballots, as did about one in three suburban and urban voters. Voters 65 and older were especially likely to vote by mail.

    Military members and Americans living overseas returned more than 905,000 mail ballots in 2024.

    A delay-tolerant system matters because the physical world is not perfectly predictable. Mail is sorted, transported, transferred between facilities and delivered by actual people using actual equipment, roads and aircraft.

    Things take time. Things break. Weather happens. Mail gets routed incorrectly. Processing centers develop backlogs.

    None of that means the voter cast a ballot late.

    A grace period is the election equivalent of allowing a packet that was sent before the deadline to finish moving through the network. Without it, ordinary delivery variance becomes data loss.

    Except the lost data is somebody’s vote.

    Trump Was Already Building Another Chokepoint

    The Supreme Court preserved a buffer at the end of the mail-ballot process.

    At the same time, the Trump administration was trying to install a new federal checkpoint at the beginning.

    On March 31, Trump signed Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections”.

    The order directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizenship lists using records from DHS, the Social Security Administration and other federal databases. It also ordered the Postal Service to develop new requirements for mail ballots, including unique ballot-envelope identifiers.

    On June 2, USPS published the resulting proposed rule for federal ballot mail.

    The proposal would require states to use a Federal Ballot Mail Portal and submit information about each person receiving a mail ballot, including:

    • The voter’s name and address
    • A unique barcode on the outgoing ballot envelope
    • A unique barcode on the return envelope
    • The election office sending the ballot

    Both outgoing and return envelopes would have to meet new design requirements and undergo USPS review for barcode placement and mailpiece design.

    Before accepting outgoing ballot mail, USPS employees would compare the mailing against the information submitted through the federal portal. A mailing that failed the verification process would not be accepted. It would be returned to the election office to correct and resubmit.

    The rule says states would remain responsible for deciding who is eligible to receive a mail ballot. USPS would not independently add or remove voters from the lists.

    That distinction is real.

    It also does not solve the problem.

    USPS would still have the power to refuse a ballot mailing because the information or barcode did not match what had been entered into the portal. The Postal Service might not decide whether Sarah Smith is eligible to vote, but it could still prevent Sarah Smith’s ballot from being mailed because somebody entered the wrong barcode.

    The practical result for Sarah Smith is exactly the same.

    She never receives a ballot.

    Trump’s Plan Adds More Ways for Things to Break

    The proposal adds a new federal database, a new portal, new accounts, new technical specifications, new certification requirements, new envelope-design requirements and two serialized barcodes tied to each voter.

    Every one of those is another dependency.

    A voter’s name could be entered differently in two systems. An address could be formatted incorrectly. A barcode could be duplicated or associated with the wrong person. A file could fail validation. A local election office could miss a certification step. The portal could be unavailable while a county is trying to upload thousands of records.

    A mistake involving one voter is bad enough. A mistake involving a batch upload or an entire mailing could affect thousands.

    And the voter would probably never know.

    There would be no rejected ballot to cure because the ballot never reached them. They would simply wait for something that was sitting back at the election office after USPS refused the mailing.

    That is not resilience.

    It is taking an already complicated process and adding a centralized federal verification layer controlled by an administration whose leader has spent years attacking mail voting.

    Trump’s involvement is not incidental. He ordered this.

    We do not need to pretend the Federal Ballot Mail Portal materialized from a neutral fascination with database hygiene.

    The administration is creating more opportunities to interrupt ballot delivery and calling those additional failure points “integrity.”

    The Same Day, Another Court Said No

    June 29 was not only the day the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s grace period.

    That same day, a federal district court declared key portions of Trump’s executive order unconstitutional and legally void.

    The case was brought by 23 states and the District of Columbia.

    The court blocked federal agencies from using the executive order to interfere with how those states maintain voter rolls or administer mail voting. It also blocked USPS from withholding mail ballots from voters who were not included on a federally approved list in those states.

    In other words, two courts reached the same basic conclusion on the same day from different directions.

    The RNC could not turn Election Day into a receipt deadline that Congress never passed.

    Trump could not unilaterally turn federal agencies and the Postal Service into national election administrators simply because he signed a piece of paper saying they were.

    States run elections unless Congress lawfully says otherwise.

    The president does not get to invent that authority for himself.

    The proposed USPS rule was still moving through the public-comment process, with comments scheduled to close July 2. The litigation was nowhere near finished. Neither was the administration’s effort to gain more control over mail voting.

    But on June 29, the buffer held.

    The Buffer Is the Security

    Grace periods, early voting, drop boxes, ballot tracking and signature-cure processes are often described as conveniences or loopholes.

    They are neither.

    They are protections against predictable failure.

    Secure systems do not assume every person, machine, database and delivery route will function perfectly. They anticipate mistakes and delays, limit the damage when something goes wrong and provide a way to recover.

    A postmark grace period does exactly that.

    The voter must act by Election Day. The system then has enough tolerance to finish processing a ballot already in motion.

    Trump’s proposal does the opposite. It adds more systems, more data transfers, more verification points and more ways for an administrative or technical error to prevent a ballot from reaching a voter in the first place.

    Then it calls that security.

    It is not.

    Security is keeping a valid vote from being lost because a truck arrived late or a sorting machine had a bad day.

    Security is building enough redundancy into the system that one typo, one outage or one delayed mail tray cannot erase someone’s participation in an election.

    On June 29, the Supreme Court refused to let the RNC redefine a ballot cast on time as a ballot cast too late.

    The buffer held.

    The next fight had already started.