President Trump used a primetime address last month to tell the country, once again, that our elections are riddled with fraud and that the SAVE America Act — a bill requiring every American to prove citizenship, in person, to register — is the cure.
We have been having some version of this argument for a decade, and everyone is exhausted. So let’s do the thing no one in Washington has been willing to do: End it.
Give every eligible citizen a free, secure ID and put the burden on the government to deliver it. Then stop making Americans register to vote at all.
This is not a concession to the president. Most Americans already support showing identification to vote, and most states already require it. The problem has never been the ID: It is who gets one.
For decades, voter ID has been engineered to keep specific people out: people of color, women who took a spouse’s name, renters, and anyone whose papers are missing.
Instead, the federal government should give every eligible citizen a voter ID, free of charge. Showing it at the polls would become as ordinary as showing it at the bar. Then, much of today’s fight simply disappears.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own database documents a mere 100 cases of noncitizen voting over 40 years among 1.3 billion ballots. Yet those cases have been the pretext for lawsuits in 20 states; ballots seizures in Georgia; and record demands in Wayne County, Mich.
Trump’s recent speech was that same argument and now with the full weight of the federal government.
Registration is the barrier where partisan officials do their worst work. Between 2022 and 2024, 21 million voters were purged from the rolls, often for partisan gain dressed as housekeeping.
Most democracies do not require voter registration. In the U.S., young people can order dinner, hail a ride and file taxes from a phone, but to vote must navigate rules that vary by state and can close a month before Election Day.
What’s frustrating is the capacity to end voter registration already exists. The government knows its citizens through Social Security, tax records and naturalization files.
Beginning this December, the Selective Service System will automatically enroll every eligible young American man in the military draft using current databases with no form and no deadline.
If the federal government can enroll you for a war, it can do the same to register you to vote.
The president’s Justice Department is demanding voter rolls from states, and state officials are right to refuse to stave off unfair elections.
With automatic registration, states would still run their elections, as they always have done remarkably well. We are talking about who is on the rolls, not who runs the polls.
In this system in which every eligible citizen is registered to vote, it no longer becomes a weapon: voting is easy, the default and then we’ve taken big steps toward universal voting, which would be the real prize.
Because until everyone votes, we do not yet have a true democracy.
We can keep swinging at the same argument about fraud and no-fraud, ID and no-ID, on a loop with no end — or we can give every citizen the proof of eligibility and in exchange, let the antiquated registration process fall away.
The most important duty a citizen has is to cast a vote. It is long past time that we build a system that treats it that way.
Kurz is the founder and president of iVote, a leading national voting rights group.