Last Thursday night, President Trump unveiled a massive trove of evidence showing that America’s election systems are vulnerable to fraud. This vulnerability is a risk to the very foundations of our Republic, and elected officials at both the state and federal levels need to take action right now.
The White House has released evidence showing extensive attempts by China to meddle in our elections. They have also uncovered Deep State efforts to cover up Chinese election meddling so that it could continue. The Department of Homeland Security also released a report showing that nearly 300,000 foreign nationals registered to vote in just a handful of states. The national number is likely much higher.
These sound like the practices of Third World banana republics. But for too long they’ve been tolerated in the world’s oldest and greatest Republic. Now that we have definitive proof, Republicans who fail to take action to stop them are complicit in the lawbreaking.
Despite outright media censorship of the issue, electoral chicanery is a proven fact in American politics. There have been notoriously questionable elections, such as in Chicago in 1960 and 1982. In 1988, Senator Mitch McConnell went to the Senate floor to decry the ongoing practice of “rampant vote buying” in Kentucky. As recently as 2019, swing state North Carolina had a do-over in a congressional election because of evidence of criminal activity and election fraud. Just last year, a school superintendent in Iowa was discovered to be an illegal alien registered to vote in Maryland.
In a closely divided country with narrow margins in Congress, the effects of voter fraud can be enormous. Even a small amount of fraud in a small number of swing states could be enough to swing an election and defy the will of the voters.
Fortunately, reform is possible. In my home state of Florida, after the embarrassment of 2000, Governors Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis both signed election reforms that have given Floridians some of the fastest, most accurate, and most trusted election results in America. There is no excuse for every red state not to do the same.
There is similarly no excuse for Republicans in Congress not to support the SAVE America Act, the House-passed bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a vote. Despite hysterical attacks from the media, these provisions are supported by four out of five Americans, including people in both parties.
Midterm elections historically have been uphill battles for virtually every presidential administration in modern history. Republicans will need to do everything they can to bring voters to the polls this fall. The best thing that they can do to motivate the Republican base is to pass the SAVE America Act.
Democrats oppose the bill because, as leftist Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) blurted out recently, securing our elections would “make it hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election.” More sober analysis has found that the bill would consistently move the electorate to the right by several points and turn Nevada and New Mexico into red states, moving 11 electoral votes out of the blue column and into the red column for a 22-point swing. This, of course, would be in addition to the nearly 20-point swing already projected after the 2030 census.
Passing the SAVE America Act, therefore, may be the biggest no-brainer in the history of politics. Yet a small number of senators have refused to reform the Senate filibuster in order to pass the bill. These include the outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is facing a reelection battle this fall.
There can be no doubt that Democrats would change the filibuster to pass a bill of their own. Just five years ago, every Democrat in the Senate—except for Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—was willing to end the filibuster to pass the mirror image of the SAVE America Act, a bill that would make our elections radically less secure. Democrats were willing to change Senate precedent so that they could legalize ballot harvesting and expand mail-in voting. Democrats then punished Manchin and Sinema by pushing them out of the party, out of office, and then out of politics altogether.
There can be no doubt that the “Our Democracy” crowd will change the filibuster and jam their fraud-enabling bill through Congress as soon as they get their hands on power. It is only Republicans who refuse to take the obvious, historic win that is right in front of their faces.
With the exit of McConnell and Tillis from Washington this fall, the odds of passing the SAVE America Act will likely improve. But if Republicans lose the midterms, then it may be too late. The key to the midterms—and to the future of our country—is the SAVE America Act. We cannot let another election go unsecured.
Chad Mizelle serves as a senior fellow for Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute.