It should tell us a lot that President Donald Trump didn’t say ensuring success in the Iran war, or correcting affordability concerns, or controversial immigration enforcement tactics, or the housing crisis should be “biggest priority” for Congress.

That distinction, he told legislators, should be reserved for the immediate passage and enactment of the SAVE America Act, the federal elections overhaul bill that now sits in the Senate. It would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, demand states remove noncitizens from voter rolls and establish strict photo ID requirements at the polls ahead of the critical midterm elections in November.

Trump wants the bill passed in no small part because he insists it would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans. The House sent a version of the bill to the Senate, but all indications are that it won’t find passage if it goes to the floor this week as planned. Republicans need 60 votes to overcome a likely filibuster from Democrats.

Sen. Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota. remained reticent about changing Senate rules to disallow the filibuster, despite Trump’s demands to do it. On his social media account last Sunday, Trump threatened to veto all other bills until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act.

Republicans seem at a crossroads, but Democrats are in a trickier position here than it might seem.

There is a thought among some in the GOP that the best strategy might be pushing the law to the floor for a vote, knowing it likely will fail, if only to get upper chamber Democrats on the record as a vote against prohibiting noncitizens from casting ballots in federal elections. It would be a validation of talking points Republicans have been hanging onto for years, namely when they questioned the legitimacy of election results in 2020.

However, on this issue, we find the Democrats are correct. The SAVE America Act would do less to ensure election integrity than it would to make it needlessly challenging for millions of American citizens to cast a ballot. At worst, the law would outright disenfranchise segments of the population that would struggle to meet the more rigorous standards for voting.

That is why we insist it should not pass, at least in its current form.

The bill that passed the House calls for prospective voters to present citizenship-proving documents — for instance, a birth certificate, United States passport, REAL ID or certificate of naturalization — to election officials, in person, in order to register.

There are plenty of potential issues with this.

For starters, it isn’t feasible to expect some Americans to be able to meet those standards. A 2024 survey from the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more than 9% of Americans able to vote don’t have access to one of these documents.

Many citizens don’t have a U.S. passport. There’s also the reality that only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington — include a specific indicator of citizenship on their state-issued REAL IDs. Birth certificates are lost or misplaced constantly.

Changing voting law would require citizens to purchase forms of identification they may not need except to register to vote, an obvious hardship on lower-income members of our communities. Purchasing a copy of a birth certificate (which runs $20 in Pennsylvania) or a U.S. passport (considerably higher) would be akin to a poll tax to them.

At minimum, it would cost a new voter in Pennsylvania more than $60 to cast a vote in federal elections, if they needed a birth certificate to register and a state-issued photo identification card at the polls.

If Trump and other elected officials insist election fraud is an issue — despite no proof that noncitizens are voting in droves and repeated findings that elections are secure — they should make the case to the American taxpayer that it is worth a sweeping, expensive rollout to fix it the proper way.

In this scenario, the cost of any minimum form of identification a citizen would be required to present to register to vote, or actually cast a ballot in a federal election, should be provided free of charge to the citizen, on the taxpayer dime.

Get that done, and one of Trump’s other add-ons to this law — a nearly complete prohibition of mail-in balloting — would be unnecessary. After all, anyone who can vote and is voting would be proven to be a citizen.

Bottom line is, no law should make voting or registering to vote inconvenient for American citizens or, obviously, serve as a significant obstacle to doing so. Democracies can not tout themselves as such if they pass laws making the mere act of voting challenging in any regard.

True democracies must go out of their way to encourage the participation of all citizens.