Trump's Election Playbook: The SAVE America Act, an 'Election Emergency,' and the 2026 Midterm Fight
The House passed the SAVE America Act in February — but it faces near-certain death in the Senate. Trump's allies are now pushing a backup plan: an executive order declaring a national "election emergency." States are already passing laws to block it. Here is what each piece actually does, and what the law says.
Where Things Stand
With the 2026 midterm elections seven months away, two parallel campaigns are underway to reshape how American voters cast ballots.
The first is legislative. The House passed the SAVE America Act on February 18, 2026, by a vote of 217–1, with every Republican voting in favor and only a single Democrat crossing over. The bill now sits in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53–47 majority but need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
The second is executive. Several allies of President Trump — including a Florida attorney who attended school with Trump and has communicated with the White House — are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would declare a national "election emergency" and impose sweeping voting changes without congressional approval. Trump has publicly floated such an order. He has also publicly denied its existence.
Democratic-led states, anticipating both tracks, have begun passing their own laws to pre-empt federal action. As of March 2026, California, Connecticut, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington have all introduced or passed legislation restricting federal agents near polling places.
What the SAVE America Act Does
The SAVE America Act — an amended version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act that previously passed the House in 2025 — contains several major provisions:
- Proof of citizenship to register: Anyone registering to vote must provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in person — such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate. Currently, new registrants only attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
- Photo ID to vote: Voters must present a photo ID at the polls. Non-photo IDs would no longer be accepted in federal elections.
- DHS database cross-checks: States would be required to run their voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to scan for noncitizens.
- Effective immediately upon enactment: All provisions would take effect the moment the bill becomes law — with no transition period for states to implement new systems.
The bill passed the House with all 217 Republicans voting yes and one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, joining them.
The Senate Math Problem
The SAVE America Act faces a steep path in the Senate. Republicans hold 53 seats, but under the filibuster rule, legislation needs 60 votes to proceed to a final vote. Democrats are united in opposition.
Some Republicans have floated converting the filibuster from a procedural rule into a literal talking filibuster — requiring Democrats to hold the floor and speak continuously to block the bill. If Democrats run out of steam, the bill could pass with a simple majority. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has not endorsed this approach, and it would derail other Senate business for weeks.
Trump himself acknowledged the math on March 27: "Because of the rules of the Senate, it's very hard for them to get the number of votes needed."
Despite the dim prospects, Trump has publicly insisted the fight is worth having. "THERE IS NOTHING THAT IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR THE U.S.A.," he wrote on social media. At a Republican fundraiser earlier this month, he told House Republicans: "It will guarantee the midterms. If you don't get it, big trouble."
The New York Times reported on March 27 that Trump's sustained push for the bill — even knowing it likely cannot pass — may serve a political purpose beyond its legislative outcome: shifting public attention away from inflation and the Iran war and onto immigration and voting issues that Republicans view as more favorable terrain.
The Emergency Executive Order Track
While the legislative fight continues in the Senate, a parallel effort has been underway since at least April 2025 to prepare an executive order that would accomplish similar goals without Congress.
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida attorney who attended New York Military Academy as a teenager with Trump and has ties to 2020 election-denial legal efforts, has been circulating a 17-page draft executive order to Trump and other administration contacts. The Guardian confirmed the document's contents.
Among its provisions: requiring all voters in 2026 to re-register with proof of citizenship; ending the use of vote-tabulation machines and mandating hand-counting of all ballots; requiring counting to be finished on election day by midnight; and banning mail-in ballots entirely.
The draft order cites foreign interference claims — including assertions of Chinese and Venezuelan interference in the 2020 election — to justify an emergency declaration. A 2021 U.S. intelligence review found that China considered ways to influence the 2020 election but ultimately did not pursue them. There is no verified evidence that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 U.S. election.
Ticktin confirmed his contact with the administration to the Guardian: "I've emailed Trump about the need for an emergency order." He declined to identify other administration officials he had been in contact with, citing concerns about losing access.
On February 13, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was exploring executive order options on voting: "I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order." He added: "There will be voter I.D. for the midterm elections whether approved by Congress or not."
Days later, in a comment to PBS, Trump appeared to distance himself from the specific Ticktin draft order. The White House has not formally confirmed or denied any executive order on elections is in preparation.
Steve Bannon's ICE Announcement
On February 28 — the same day U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran — Steve Bannon said on his podcast that the federal government was planning to send ICE agents to patrol polling stations on election day. Bannon framed it as a measure to prevent a Democratic victory: "We will never again allow an election to be stolen."
No formal administration announcement of ICE deployment to polling places has been made. The White House has not confirmed the plan.
In response, several states have moved to pass laws creating buffer zones around polling sites. New Mexico has barred armed agents from election sites. Connecticut has introduced a state bill establishing a 250-foot buffer from federal agents at polls. Similar legislation is under consideration in California, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington.
What Election Experts Say About the Proof-of-Citizenship Requirement
Election administration officials and voting rights researchers have raised practical concerns about the SAVE America Act's core provision.
According to a 2023 survey conducted by SSRS on behalf of the University of Maryland and three voting-rights groups, approximately 9% of voting-age citizens in the United States do not have easy access to a document proving their citizenship — such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate.
Kansas implemented a proof-of-citizenship requirement in 2013 and operated under it until a federal court struck it down in 2018. During that period, 31,089 people were unable to register because they could not provide documentation. That amounted to 12% of all people who attempted to register in Kansas during those years. By contrast, Kansas identified only 39 confirmed noncitizens who had registered to vote in the previous 14 years.
"This is bad for voters, but this will be a nightmare for election administrators," Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told Votebeat.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said her office would face significant challenges training clerks and registrars to uniformly verify citizenship documents under the new requirements.
Multiple election officials noted that the SAVE America Act provides no additional funding to states for implementation, and no transition period. If the bill were enacted today, states would be required to build entirely new document verification systems before the November 2026 elections — roughly seven months away.
The Brennan Center for Justice's Sean Morales-Doyle noted that the center and other groups successfully sued in 2025 to block key parts of a March 2025 Trump executive order to change election procedures, with some portions still being litigated on appeal.
The Trump Campaign's Own Stated Rationale
The stated justification for both the SAVE America Act and the proposed executive order is the prevention of noncitizen voting.
Federal law already makes it a crime for noncitizens to register or vote in federal elections. The most comprehensive study of the issue — a 2017 Government Accountability Office review — found no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. Noncitizen registration and voting, when it does occur, is typically the result of administrative error rather than deliberate fraud, according to the Brennan Center and the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Trump and his allies lost 61 of 62 court cases challenging the 2020 election results, according to David Becker of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Trump's own position on the bill has evolved publicly. In late February he expressed doubt about the executive order circulating among allies. In March, he rebranded the SAVE Act as the "SAVE America Act" — telling Fox News he thought "SAVE Act" was "a stupid name" — and has since pushed it as a centerpiece of his legislative agenda, even as he acknowledges it is unlikely to pass the Senate.
The Democratic Response
Democratic officials have publicly framed the combination of the SAVE America Act, the potential executive order, redistricting efforts, and possible ICE deployment as a coordinated strategy to reshape election outcomes.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore stated in a public appearance: "I think these are all tools of how the president is trying to think about a much larger plan, which is if you cannot hold on to power through democratic means, you find other ways."
Former President Barack Obama recorded an ad for Virginia voters in March supporting a redistricting proposal, stating: "Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, but right now they are under threat."
Democrats are running with what CNN described as a "Trump conspiracy theory" — the argument that these individual measures, taken together, constitute a deliberate plan to guarantee Republican control of Congress regardless of the vote share. Democrats flipped 29 red-to-blue state legislative seats since Trump took office, including a Florida district containing Mar-a-Lago, and polls show they are favored to retake the House in November.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a New York Times opinion piece on March 23: "Republicans like to pretend that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill. Though on the surface it appears to be one, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans."
The Legal Landscape
The constitutional authority to regulate federal elections is shared between Congress and the states, with Congress having the power to override state election laws under Article I. The president does not have unilateral authority under the Constitution to impose voting requirements; any executive order seeking to do so would face immediate legal challenge.
In 2025, a federal court blocked key portions of Trump's first election-related executive order, ruling that some provisions exceeded presidential authority. Appeals are ongoing.
Whether a president can declare an "election emergency" to impose nationwide voting changes is an untested legal question. The precedent for executive action during elections is limited and does not include changes to voter registration or ballot-counting procedures.
Several constitutional law scholars contacted by The Guardian described the proposed executive order as legally dubious. "There's a constantly shifting reference to different theories about things that happened six years ago," said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. "People who want to change voting policies are looking for ways to justify the president doing that."