by Steve Benen | Mar 9, 2026 | Congress, elections, Maddowblog, Politics
A few months before Election Day 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage of sorts to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and unveil a proposal they seemed excited about.
The Republican duo pitched legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. (The absurdity of watching two notorious election deniers pretend to be deeply concerned with the integrity of elections was a detail the public was apparently supposed to overlook.) Soon after, the proposal took legislative form, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (or SAVE Act) was born.
In time, however, this solution in search of a problem metastasized. Instead of just making it harder for Americans to register to vote, Trump and his allies expanded the original version of the SAVE Act by adding provisions that also made it harder to cast votes and renaming the package the “Save America Act.”
In recent weeks, the president announced that this still wasn’t good enough. In addition to making it harder to register to vote and requiring an ID to cast ballots, Trump decided the package also had to impose harsh new restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as new restrictions on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors.
He still hasn’t explained what punishing transgender Americans has to do with voting rights, but the president has begun condemning earlier iterations of the legislation as “the watered-down version,” which he expects Congress to disregard.
The far-right package doesn’t have any realistic chance of success in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to advance, though Trump apparently has a new plan in mind. After spending part of the weekend
by Brad Reed | Feb 27, 2026 | Article, elections, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
by Jen Fifield | Feb 13, 2026 | DHS, elections, News, Voter Suppression, Voting
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback. Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate. The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions.
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by Jake Johnson | Feb 12, 2026 | Article, elections, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 12, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Doing President Donald Trump’s bidding, the Republican-controlled US House on Wednesday approved legislation that would potentially prevent millions of Americans from participating in federal elections by instituting draconian voter ID requirements, mandating documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, and requiring states to share voter information with the Department of Homeland Security.
The White House-backed legislation, an updated version of the so-called SAVE Act that the House approved in 2024, passed with the support of every Republican who took part in the vote and one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas—notably the recipient of a pardon from the president.
Election experts and watchdog groups said the bill represents a massive assault on the right to vote, with many of its provisions directly in line with what Trump has demanded ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“Congressional Republicans are attempting to commandeer the midterm election cycle and increase voting margins in President Trump’s favor by putting a finger on the scale of our elections and pushing nonsensical, anti-democratic laws to stop voters from casting a ballot,” said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. “This overreaching, un-American bill tacks on unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to vote, all of which would harm voters across the political spectrum.”
The bill is likely dead on arrival in the narrowly divided Senate, with every Democrat and at least one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, expected to oppose it.
But its passage through the House with unanimous support from the Republican caucus—whose members claim to be driven by a desire to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is already unlawful, and combat voter fraud,
by Jake Johnson | Feb 12, 2026 | 2026 midterms, Congress, elections, GOP, Henry Cuellar, News, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights
Doing President Donald Trump’s bidding, the Republican-controlled US House on Wednesday approved legislation that would potentially prevent millions of Americans from participating in federal elections by instituting draconian voter ID requirements, mandating documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, and requiring states to share voter information with the Department of Homeland…
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by Sasha Abramsky | Feb 9, 2026 | Article, elections, ICE, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story was originally published on Truthout on Feb. 05, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
On February 3, as Donald Trump was doubling down on his push to “nationalize” elections, Steve Bannon, MAGA’s version of Rasputin, promised his War Room podcast audience that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will be deployed to swarm polling places during the upcoming midterm elections.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon warned ominously. “We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”
To be absolutely clear, neither Donald Trump’s nor Bannon’s proposals are remotely legal (or predicated on fact). The law prohibits intimidating voters where they are casting ballots — and it’s hard to see how the presence of armed, masked agents from a paramilitary outfit that has shown no compunction at kidnapping and killing people would have any other purpose. And the Constitution gives states control over their own elections’ processes, thus directly contradicting Trump’s desire, articulated in an interview with conservative media personality Dan Bongino, for the GOP to “take over” the elections systems of at least 15 states.
Yet Bannon and Trump are deadly serious. For them, any election that doesn’t go their way is illegitimate, and both are willing to use their vast media platforms to agitate for armed interventions at polling places. Both are, apparently, also indifferent to democratic norms, and are willing to push the constitutional system to the breaking point to get their way in the midterms.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to Bannon’s fiery rhetoric by denying that ICE would be swarming polling stations in November, but it said that
