(Editor’s note: The Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook today expressed an opinion about the Save America Act. It is being shared so you can form an opinion.)
President Trump broke into prime-time TV on Thursday night to talk to the nation about election security, but it must have been a letdown for anybody expecting a thrilling plot twist in Mr. Trump’s long yarn about his 2020 defeat. Instead he made a sales pitch for a bill that can’t pass, using doubts it wouldn’t address.
Mr. Trump released documents that he said show vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems, and some of them are real, though they run the gamut. He said voter files on millions of people, including names, addressees and party affiliations, “have been bought, stolen or hacked by China.” A 2020 intelligence memo advised that adversaries “have the capability to compromise” election infrastructure, especially “registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites.”
But since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” it says. “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” Achieving it across many jurisdictions “would be difficult” and “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
Mr. Trump went on to say that CIA reporting indicates Venezuela’s dictatorship conspired to rig its own election and “digitally alter vote totals.” He presented this as proof of concept that such a thing is possible. Sorry, the state of Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024, isn’t Venezuela, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn’t Nicolás Maduro.
Other files involve a drive for voter registration in Michigan. Mr. Trump alleged that some canvassers in 2020, who received gift cards based on productivity, “submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist.” If that’s true, law enforcement ought to pursue it. Yet how many registration forms? Were they accepted? Did any phantom people actually get a ballot? Mr. Trump didn’t say.
Then he urged passage of the SAVE America Act. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat,” he said. “This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that?” He also called to ban mail ballots, “except for illness, disability, military deployment or travel.”
The public likes voter ID, with a poll last year finding 83% of adults, and 71% of Democrats, favor it. Yet the SAVE America Act goes further, rendering most driver’s licenses insufficient to register to vote, and that’s to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s push to override laws in many GOP states—Florida, Georgia, most of the Midwest—that offer mail ballots for convenience.
In a floor speech Thursday, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis argued that even if Congress whooped through the bill, there isn’t time to implement it before November. By his reckoning, the U.S. has about 10,000 county clerks or municipal entities that carry out America’s decentralized elections. The midterms are barely 100 days away, early voting sooner. “The math doesn’t work,” he said. “It can’t be done.”
Mr. Tillis isn’t against ID rules, and he helped pass North Carolina’s. “We should figure out a way to get every state to get to voter ID,” he said. Yet he was unsparing toward Congress’s proponents of the SAVE America Act. “Mr. President, these people are misleading you if they’re telling you that this can be implemented by November,” he said. “This seems like a legit proposal, but it isn’t.”
Unfortunately, the message from Mr. Trump and others has been that America’s elections can’t be trusted, and the only hope is the SAVE America Act. Aside from being untrue, this is a political backfire for the GOP. If Republican voters believe it, and the bill falls short, then why waste time going to the polls in November? Has the GOP already forgotten how Mr. Trump’s fraud outbursts cost them two Senate seats in the 2021 Georgia runoffs?
Republicans should be campaigning on what they want to do with two more years in power. There are ways to improve voting integrity, but Mr. Tillis is right that it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest. In fact, the intel memo Mr. Trump declassified warned this is what a U.S. adversary might do. “Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering US elections,” it says, “which could allow false narratives to gain traction.”
That’s dated Jan. 15, 2020. Now there’s some prescient intelligence.