For months, the most heard mantra on conservative American TV and radio is one that starts with the idea that if showing your ID is necessary to enter "a bar or a club or an airport," then it should also be required to vote. "It's not crazy, and that's what we should be talking about," said, for example, the country's acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, trying to score points with President Donald Trump last Sunday. However, in politics, things are rarely as straightforward as they seem. And something as basic and non-negotiable as an ID card is at the center of a brutal and much broader political battle, full of maneuvers, dirty tricks, and misinformation, a battle with decades of abuses, oppression, and civil rights restrictions in memory. A dispute that could leave millions of citizens, especially African Americans, Hispanics, or married women, without the option to cast their ballot.
The first Tuesday of November, the United States will hold one of the most important legislative elections in decades. Americans will have to decide whether both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands or if they give Democrats a critical victory to start an effective opposition against the Administration. At stake are not only seats, committee presidencies, the keys to the agenda and procedures, but also the resources to stop the Trump steamroller and launch a wave of investigations, even leading to a new era of impeachments.
In the United States, there is no single, valid, and mandatory national ID document throughout the country. There is not even a universally accepted equivalent at the state level. It operates with driver's licenses, identification or residency cards, Social Security numbers, or other less reliable but generally accepted alternatives. It is the result of a long-standing struggle over competencies to limit centralized power, but also of a historical distrust in authority and the loss of privacy, and the result of constant abuses of power, especially against minorities, since the era of the so-called Jim Crow laws.
After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment prohibited denying the vote based on race, but Confederate states found indirect mechanisms to make it nearly impossible in practice, such as requiring documentation that Black individuals did not have, imposing poll taxes that African Americans, who were poor, could not pay, or applying arbitrary literacy tests, clauses known as "grandfather clauses," which exempted whites from all these procedures if they could prove that their ancestors had voted before the war. This was compounded by systemic violence and official intimidation.
A classic example used by political scientists is Mississippi, where, in 1890, when a Constitution was approved, around 90% of adult Black men were registered to vote; by 1965, less than 10% were. Laws that currently prevent ex-convicts from voting are also brutal: in Tennessee, for example, 21% of its Black adults do not have the right to vote due to their criminal records. According to the NAACP, one of the major civil rights organizations, almost half of African Americans under 30 do not have an ID with their current name and address, for various reasons.
But this anomaly of the ID within the Western world (slightly less within the Anglo-Saxon world) has now become a top political issue, led by Trump's campaign to immediately pass his 'Law to Save America' project, a proposal that, among other things, would require citizenship proofs, birth certificates, or ban mail-in voting (except for illness, disability, military service, or travel). "It must be done immediately. It takes absolute priority over everything else. IT MUST BE A PRIORITY," the president recently wrote in a social media post. "I, as president, will not sign any other bill until this one is passed," he warned.
The law would require individuals to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when casting the ballot, but also require states to share voter registration data with the Government, something many have refused to do. Elections are a state, not federal, matter, despite Trump's attempts to take control. His proposal would also impose personal criminal liability on election officials who violate the law, an additional pressure measure following the many lawsuits the Republican leader filed in 2020 or his team's defamation of officials, for which figures like Rudolph Giuliani were convicted and fined.
Trump claims that millions of illegal immigrants vote every year, brought en masse by Democrats to retain power. There is no evidence of anything remotely similar. "Numerous studies have reached the same conclusion: cases of non-citizen voters are extremely rare. Our 2017 study analyzed 42 jurisdictions where 23.5 million votes were cast and found only about 30 cases of non-citizen voters, representing 0.0001% of the total. The Heritage Foundation, advocate of the SAVE Act [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act], documented only 68 cases of non-citizen voters since the 1980s, out of over a billion votes cast," denounces the Brennan Center, one of the harshest critics.
The Government, with an increasingly impatient Trump, is desperately trying to push through the Save America Act, while using the FBI and the Department of Justice for investigations into alleged past frauds. The president's allies within the MAGA world demand that he mobilize all resources, such as deploying the National Guard or immigration agencies. "They are damn right that we are going to have ICE surround the polling stations in November! You can complain and cry all you want, but we will never allow an election to be stolen again," declared Steve Bannon, a guru of the global alternative right, warning of the consequences, also for people like himself, if Democrats regain control of Congress.
Currently, the nine justices are also evaluating whether federal laws allow votes received by mail after Election Day to be counted, even if they were sent before. This would have significant effects, as many people have changed their voting dynamics due to the pandemic. Everything will go through the Supreme Court, now or before the next presidential elections, giving the institution decisive power. Additionally, over 30 states will hold elections for their supreme courts this year, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Montana, where judicial decisions have been points of political conflict, and in Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, where the results could change the balance of judicial power.
At the same time, states are immersed in a brutal race of gerrymandering, that is, to strategically redesign legislative districts against the clock. These measures have been taken since the 19th century and can secure up to four or five seats in the largest states. Texas and California have already done so, and there are a dozen other cases in progress. Last week, in a key victory for Trump, the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the historic 1965 civil rights law by ruling that Louisiana's electoral map had been unconstitutionally drawn to create two majority-black districts. "That map is an unconstitutional electoral manipulation," wrote Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the six conservatives. They are all manipulations, but that one was overturned.
Hours after the ruling, the Republican-controlled Florida House of Representatives approved an aggressively redrawn map that could give conservatives four additional seats, endangering several Democratic congressmen. Trump has urged his supporters to redraw their maps "even for those who have already started voting," stating on Truth Social that this would give Republicans "more than 20 seats in the midterms."
The US system, inconceivable for a Spaniard, complex and counterintuitive, has been functioning, for better or for worse, for many decades. There is a vast academic literature and broad consensus among electoral experts and state authorities on both sides of the political spectrum that it is quite robust, secure, effective, and almost immune to fraud, especially "massive" fraud. However, it is also an enormously complicated, slow, and expensive system that lends itself to conspiracy theories about electronic voting, endless recounts, and tabulations. The Trump Administration, the first to encourage these theories, claims to be still investigating possible links with Venezuela for the "theft" of 2020, vainly seeking evidence of the leader's obsessions.