Trump’s Voter Elimination Act Is an American Enabling Act

So what’s the Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world™, up to these days?

Debating the most anti-Constitutional war in American history? Trying to help Americans with a sudden array of price shocks from the series of “worst-case” scenarios the most anti-Constitutional war in history has spurred?

Nope. Not at all. Instead, it’s debating Trump’s Voter Elimination Act — a bill its sponsors call the “SAVE America Act,” whose architects know will save exactly two things: the Republican majority and Donald Trump’s quest toward dictatorship.

All you have to do is meditate on all this for just a moment. So bear with me.

The bill that has completely obsessed Republicans in Congress requires a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Only half of Americans have a passport. 21 million Americans lack access to their citizenship documents. Sixty-nine million married women have a different last name than the name on their birth certificate. The bill also requires that documentation be presented in person at an elections office — meaning people in rural areas could drive up to eight hours just to register. It would effectively end mail, online, and voter registration drives.

This is before we get to trans Americans. States that have already implemented similar laws have disenfranchised up to 200,000 trans people. Kansas just retroactively invalidated the driver’s licenses of 1,700 trans residents. That law has already been introduced in Oklahoma. Imara Jones of TransLash Media named the pattern: everything is a road test.

Add those numbers. Now subtract them from the electorate. What remains is not the American people. It is a selected subset of the American people — selected by the party that wrote the selection criteria.

But here’s the twist. This bill would keep Republicans from the polls. Lots of them.

“In Texas, Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to lack easy access to documentary proof of citizenship,” the Washington Post noted. And Reuters points out, along with other burdens for traditional GOP voters in the bill, passport ownership is lower in states that supported Trump in 2024. Some married women are even Republicans, as hard as that is to believe! Women marry Republicans. Look it up!

So what gives?

Trump’s always confessing

Our wannabe strongman told Republican lawmakers the bill would “guarantee the midterms,” warning that without it, there would be “big trouble.” He did not say it would make elections more secure. He said it would guarantee an outcome.

Then he said the even quieter part. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” That is a president threatening to impose voting rules by executive fiat. Every constitutional scholar not currently on the Heritage Foundation payroll calls that illegal. This administration has shown no reluctance to engage in illegal activities.

His DOJ has already raided the Fulton County Election Center — the largest concentration of Black registered voters in any county in the South — under what election lawyers describe as a completely debunked set of claims about 2020. Twenty-five FBI agents with chainsaws. For ballots. The project is not to investigate fraud. It is to make election administration so legally precarious and personally terrifying that the people who run elections quit.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, who has been fighting this in Georgia for years, put it plainly: “They don’t steal an election overnight. You build over time.”

And what Trump is building is not guaranteed wins for the GOP, but the effective end of democracy as we've known it, which, admittedly, we have not known very well.

The chaos is in the plan

Election officials across the political spectrum have called it “laughable” to think the Voter Elimination Act could be implemented before the midterms. The bill provides no additional funding. No money to hire staff to review documents. No runway to train clerks across hundreds of municipalities on what counts and what doesn’t. No guidance on what an election worker does when a married woman’s birth certificate doesn’t match her ID.

It does provide criminal penalties—up to five years in prison for honest clerical mistakes. The California attorney general noted the bill would criminalize the people whose job is to run the election. Minnesota’s Secretary of State said it is “unheard of for something this sweeping in scope to take effect immediately.” Arizona’s Secretary of State estimated $35 to $40 million in costs just for the upcoming midterms — “and that’s just my state.”

The chaos created by an unimplementable law, imposed on underfunded election offices, staffed by people who can now be personally prosecuted for paperwork errors, does not prevent the election. It prevents a trustworthy one. And the regime is already positioned to say the results can’t be trusted.

If implemented, this would be an American Enabling Act.

What was the Enabling Act?

Now you may say, “Dear LOLGOP! Why go full wine dad and compare this to Hitler? America’s bad enough—all our presidents have been cads, war criminals, slaveholders, or all of the above?!” And to that I say, we have to. For we have no example in American history of a president trying to use powers he has and the powers he doesn’t have to nullify the power of the electorate to pick and check our elected representatives.

The Enabling Act — formally, “The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich” — was passed, briefly after the “mysterious” fire at the German Reichstag, by that elected body on March 23, 1933. The legislation gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to enact laws without parliamentary approval, override the constitution, and implement measures immediately. The opposition Social Democrats gave their speech against it. They were jeered. The bill passed with the required two-thirds majority — achieved partly because the stormtroopers surrounding the building had already arrested or barred Communist members from entering. Within months, all other political parties were banned. The Enabling Act was not the end of German democracy. It was the legal mechanism by which German democracy committed suicide.

So why do I bring this up? I’m somewhat hyperbolically arguing, as you may have noted in the above section, that this Voter Elimination Bill is the closest thing we will see in 2026 in the United States to a possible American Enabling Act.

My point is not that Trump is Hitler—though with unnecessary deaths from Covid, the shuttering of USAID, and the potential carnage from sparking a world war by attacking Iran, he’s doing his best! Nor is the legislation identical or even similar. But it’s damn close when you think about the mechanism at play. No violent coup, just legislation — passed with procedure, with debate, with a vote that hands one faction the permanent structural advantage to determine the outcome of future governance.

But here’s the thing: Hitler’s Enabling Act passed. Trump’s Voter Elimination Act probably won’t. John Thune keeps telling us he doesn’t have the votes. But stop thinking about this like legislation. Think about it like the Reichstag fire.

The Reichstag didn’t actually have to be set on fire by the Communists. It just had to be on fire. The Senate debate over the Voter Elimination Act — a bill that can’t pass, that would disenfranchise the regime’s own voters, that election officials across the country call unimplementable — is not a serious legislative effort. It is the fire. The bill fails. The regime declares the system broken. Your leaders have failed you.

Trump must step in

This is not speculation. Anti-voting activists coordinating with the White House have been circulating a 17-page draft executive order since at least July 2025. It would allow Trump to declare a national emergency, ban mail-in ballots and voting machines, and require all 211 million registered American voters to re-register in person — with proof of citizenship — before November. The emergency? A conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — a claim the U.S. intelligence community explicitly disproved in 2021.

The man leading the effort is Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida attorney who attended military school with Trump. His most recent client is the Colorado county clerk, currently serving 9 years in state prison for breaching voting systems to find fraud that didn’t exist. The draft order Ticktin champions is riddled with errors — at one point, it cites a section of an executive order that doesn’t exist and invokes two laws for emergency powers that don’t actually grant them. The conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, who also claims authorship, has said Trump “can use his Article 2 powers as commander in chief and have the military run the elections if he had to.”

Trump denied knowing anything about it. Then posted on Truth Social that he has been searching “the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject” and will be presenting “an irrefutable one in the very near future” — in the form of an executive order. A Department of Homeland Security official appointed by Trump has already formally proposed that he declare a national emergency to justify imposing new rules on state and local governments on how they run elections.

Every constitutional scholar, voting rights expert, and state election official who has reviewed this says it is blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear: states administer elections. The president has no role.

None of that matters. That is not the Enabling Act argument.

The Enabling Act argument is this: you don’t need the order to be legal. You need the fire. You need the crisis. You need the Senate to fail to pass the bill so the regime can say Congress failed us, the system is broken, the election is already being stolen, and the president had no choice but to act. Just like a potential world war launched without Congressional debate and without even a serious attempt to explain why we’re risking it, no American president has ever seriously attempted anything like this. The Voter Elimination Act is something genuinely new in the American experiment — a legislative attempt to make representative democracy optional for the party in power for a president who has already tried to commit one violent coup to stay in power.

Georgia is where the game becomes real

Fulton County, Georgia, is home to Atlanta. It is the largest concentration of Black registered voters in any county in the South. It is also the county where, because of a 2021 voter suppression law passed by the Georgia legislature in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, a MAGA-controlled state election board now has the legal power to take over up to four “underperforming” county boards — sideline the local Democratic majority, appoint replacements of their choosing, purge voter rolls, close polling places, cut early voting, and contest election outcomes.

“If you control Fulton County, you can pretty much control the outcome of all statewide races in Georgia,” as voting rights expert Ari Berman put it. And control of Georgia’s Senate seat could determine control of the United States Senate.

The FBI raid on Fulton County’s election center — 700 boxes of ballots seized, Tulsi Gabbard on-site providing agents a phone line directly to the president, the Director of National Intelligence attending a domestic law enforcement operation she is prohibited by law from participating in — was not about 2020. The affidavit recycled debunked conspiracy theories that had already failed in court multiple times.

It was about creating a pretext. Get the ballots. Spin the conspiracy. Use the manufactured evidence to justify the state election board takeover, handing Fulton County to election deniers who answer to Trump.

After the raid, Brad Raffensperger — the Secretary of State who supposedly stood up to Trump in 2020 and declined to “find” 11,780 votes — said nothing for nearly a week. Gabriel Sterling, who gave impassioned testimony denouncing Trump’s lies after January 6th, said nothing. Both are now running for higher office. Both need Trump’s endorsement.

Lauren Groh-Wargo named what’s actually happening: “The language they use — ‘clean, pristine voter rolls’ — is a direct line to the language used to disenfranchise Black Americans. It’s the same language.”

Fulton County is not the only target. Berman names Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas — any city with the democratic density and minority voting power to cost the GOP a state. The FBI raid was the test run.

The pretext machine is already operating. The Voter Elimination Act failing in the Senate doesn’t stop any of this. It feeds it.

Musk wants to buy democracy itself now

Elon Musk is the largest donor in the history of American political donations. And his donations have all served to achieve one goal — the absorption of all political power in America to one man and his favored voters. Musk has been among the loudest voices demanding that the Senate pass a bill that would exclude tens of millions of American citizens from the franchise. And when the largest donor in history whines, Republicans who depend on his largess listen.

But that is the surface story. Here is the specific one.

DOGE staffers working inside the Social Security Administration improperly accessed and shared sensitive personal data on millions of Americans — including, according to a whistleblower, copying the NUMIDENT database, which contains Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and parents’ names for nearly every living American, onto a personal thumb drive. The SSA’s own inspector general opened a formal investigation. Two DOGE employees were referred to a federal watchdog for potentially violating the Hatch Act. The SSA also found that DOGE employees communicated with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security data with state voter rolls.

Sen. Ron Wyden called it “one of the largest known data breaches in American history, perpetrated by Trump appointees for the explicit purpose of weaponizing Americans’ sensitive personal data for political gain.”

Now, those voter fraud narratives were amplified by Musk on X and cited on the House floor as the justification for passing the Voter Elimination Act.

The sequence: DOGE accessed data it wasn’t supposed to have. Used it to generate voter fraud claims that experts immediately rejected. Musk amplified those claims on the platform he owns to the audience his money built. Congress cited them to pass a bill that would disenfranchise 69 million married women.

That is not a donor funding a cause. That is manufacturing the predicate to undo Americans’ right to pick their own leaders with one of the greatest breaches of trust in US history.

First they came for the South

The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report — the largest global dataset on democratic governance ever compiled — found that the United States has lost its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than 50 years. The America we are being compared to is veering toward pre-Voting Rights Act America, still emerging from effective apartheid.

The last time the Senate held a talking filibuster over voting rights was 1964, when Southern Democrats held the floor for 60 days to kill the Civil Rights Act. They lost. Congress passed it. The franchise expanded.

Now Republicans are using the same procedure — the same chamber, the same unlimited debate rules — to run it in reverse. What Southern Democrats tried to preserve through obstruction in 1964, MAGA is trying to restore through legislation in 2026. The Voter Elimination Act would mechanically dismantle the registration infrastructure that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was specifically designed to build.

Fair Fight Action’s Lauren Groh-Wargo named what the national political ecosystem missed while it was laser-focused on 270 electoral votes: “MAGA, Trump, and the autocrats understand that their most expedient route to total control is the gutting of Black political power. Period.”

The Voter Elimination Act is one of three vectors, as Project 2025 itself describes them: partisan gerrymandering; the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act through the courts; and remaking how the census counts Americans. Their own calculus, stated openly, is that those three changes lock over 40 congressional seats and permanent supermajorities in Southern state legislatures. That remakes the country regardless of what voters in California or Michigan want.

This is not a Southern problem that arrived in Washington. This is a project that started in the South, was ignored by the national political ecosystem for decades while the infrastructure was being built, and is now being imposed everywhere.

What stops this

Given that John Thune keeps telling us he doesn’t have the votes, the Senate debate is the performance, the predicate. The chaos of an unimplementable law is the threat. The subpoenas of election workers in Fulton County and criminal penalties for poll workers have already had a chilling effect. And the man who spent more money on American elections than any human being in history built the lie that the whole thing stands on. And that’s in addition to the malign influence campaigns against the American people that have and will be committed by his Super PAC.

This is the overwhelming attack on our freedom we face from the very top down. And they are targeting the institution that, according to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, has held up best thus far—our elections. We held them in 2025. Republicans got whipped. Trump refuses to let that happen again.

We need to make sure he doesn’t get to decide that, which would be the whole point of our Constitution.

Thirty-three organizations in Romulus, Michigan, refused to let ICE build a human warehouse quietly. They found out. They showed up. They can still keep that warehouse from being filled up with our neighbors.

Go to your local board of elections meeting. The other side has been showing up to those meetings for years — trained, networked, and organized — while everyone else was watching the national news. Sign up at powerthepolls.org to become a poll worker. Show up and say thank you to the people running elections who are being screamed at and followed home and threatened with prison for doing their jobs.

Your ballot is not something that gets stolen overnight, Lauren Groh-Wargo reminds us. It is built or dismantled one meeting, one administrator, one election at a time. They know that. They have been counting on the rest of us not knowing what’s at stake long enough to finish the job.

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