Why Does Trump Want the Save America Act? The Answer Should Worry Us.

Ian Ayres

On Wednesday, President Trump threatened to block the extension of the surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which expired on Saturday, unless a measure to reauthorize also included his beloved elections bill, the SAVE America Act. 

Trump has called passage of the SAVE America Act his chief legislative priority and has continually applied pressure on Senate Republicans to force the passage of the bill.  

Why does the President care so much about the Act’s passage—especially since it is abundantly clear that he does not have sufficient Senate votes to overcome a filibuster?

Neoclassical economics asks us to reason from a presumption that actors are rational.  Some observers find the President's recent behavior unintelligible on those terms, but I want to take seriously the possibility that there is a coherent reason behind his fixation, and to walk through the candidates.  The rational hypothesis that survives scrutiny is the one that, most of all, we should not want to be true.

The most natural reading of the SAVE Act is that the President sincerely believes large numbers of noncitizens are voting in federal elections.  But the best estimates put illegal noncitizen voting at a few dozen ballots out of more than a hundred fifty million cast.  No rational persons fears federal noncitizen voting.

A second reading is that passage would deliver the 2026 midterms for Republicans, as the President has claimed it would.  It will not.  The Act’s onerous proof-of-citizenship requirements only apply to new registrants, including first-time voters and those who move across state lines.  It thus cannot deliver a Republican wave in the 2026 midterms, because the voters who will decide those races are already on state rolls.  

A third reading is the long game.  As people move, marry, or turn eighteen, more must register or reregister to vote, and on these people the Act’s effects would compound.  Jacob Slaughter and I estimated the electoral impacts of the SAVE Act, and found the longer term impacts to be at best mixed. In the long run, the Act might modestly favor Republicans.  But the President has little incentive to spend present political capital for the possibility of marginal gains that will accrue long after he appears on any ballot. And reasonable observers question whether President Trump cares much about the success of the Republican party after he is no longer holding political office.

A fourth reading worth mentioning is distraction – that the Act is being elevated to draw attention from other liabilities, including the President's connection to Jeffrey Epstein.  The hypothesis proves too much.  It could be wheeled out to explain almost any of the President’s high-salience policy initiatives.

That leaves a fifth reading, and it is the most disquieting one.  The Act has virtually no prospect of passing the Senate in its current form.  If the President convinces the public that the Act is necessary, and Congress refuses to enact it, he can claim that the integrity of the next election is in doubt and that an executive remedy is justified.

By this interpretation, the President's campaign for the Act builds the predicate for unilateral action: the suspension or federally supervised disruption of the midterm elections, sufficient to secure continued Republican control of the House.  This is not as speculative as we would hope.  Federal troops and law enforcement agents have been deployed to Los Angeles, Washington, Portland, and Chicago under contested theories of executive authority.  A draft executive order circulated among Trump allies would declare a national emergency to ban mail-in ballots and voting machines.  And recently, the President issued a different executive order attempting to grant his Postal Service unprecedented federal control over who is eligible to vote by mail.

A rational plan of election interference is certainly a more elaborate explanation than what the available evidence requires.  Behavior that looks engineered has often, in this Presidency, turned out to be simply erratic or impulsive. 

But if it emerges that my bad-faith reading is even partly right, it points to a highly uncomfortable move Democrats might consider: passing the SAVE Act.  Doing so (perhaps with a pledge to revisit the legislation in 2028) could, in a perverse way, be in the best interests of our democracy.

A Congress that passes the Act would deny the President the legislative failure he needs to justify his election intervention to the public.  If asked to rule on such an intervention, the Supreme Court might also be more likely to strike down executive action that premised on insecure voting than executive action taken where Congress has been silent.

Such a strategy is fraught, and comes with the repellent cost of disenfranchising millions of Americans.  But the case for it grows with the plausibility one assigns to possibility that President Trump will use the bill’s failure as a justification for doing something much worse.