Will Trump succeed in changing the US voting system?

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1:53They will all be there. So for tickets, follow the link in the episode description. Now, on with the episode. If there's one thing you know about Donald Trump, you know that he believes American elections, particularly the ones he's been involved in, are fraudulent. He is now proposing big changes to the way that America votes, how elections are held in the US. He says these changes are so important that he won't sign any other legislation until his voting changes are passed by Congress. There is a problem, though. He's made the decision to tie these proposals to funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which the Democrats are currently blocking in protest against immigration enforcement.

2:33So, what is behind the deadlock in Congress over funding for homeland security? Why is the President telling Republicans to refuse a deal on all of these things? And what does it say about the future of elections in the US. What are the pros and cons of what Donald Trump is actually suggesting? Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:56Anthony Zurcher:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover-up, and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump arrangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

3:23Hello, it's Justin in the fair West Country city of Bath.

3:28Anthony Zurcher:And it's Anthony, and I'm going to call this the worldwide headquarters now, since you're not in London, of AmeriCast in Washington, D.C. Temporary worldwide headquarters. I think I'd probably accept that, but no more than it. Anthony, here's a question to start, though. You're not there for long, are you? You're about to get on a flight. How long before you're on it, in theory, at least? I've got about three hours before my flight takes off, maybe about two hour and a half hours until I board. And honestly, I'm a little nervous because there have been massive delays at some security checkpoints at airports around the country because the Department of Homeland Security has been shut down, lacked funding for 40 days now.

4:09Anthony Zurcher:And that means that security guards at the airports are working without pay. And a lot of them just aren't showing up to work. So lines are stretching out the door at airports. Waits in places like Houston are going on to four hours. It is chaos. And I'm going to experience that firsthand as I fly back to Texas for a political conference in Dallas. And the whole thing gummed up by the Democrats' objections to this bill that Donald Trump says is so important. It passed the House, didn't it? So it's gone halfway, but it's clogged up in the Senate. What does the bill do? There's a couple of things to unpack here.

4:49Anthony Zurcher:The bill you're talking about is called the Save America Act, which is election law reforms that Republicans want to pass. And some key provisions of this are a nationwide mandate for ID in order to cast a ballot and also a requirement that whenever you register to vote in this country, you have to prove your citizenship, either with a birth certificate or a passport. It bans voting by mail, except in certain specific cases like military overseas or illness. It also prevents you from registering outside of a voting office, a government office. So, you know, you see these voter registration drives on college campuses where people register voters who are walking between classes or at malls.

5:38Anthony Zurcher:All of that would end. Right. That's very clear. That's what Trump wants. Why is it that the Democrats feel so strongly about this? Why is it that they can't come to some kind of a deal? What is it that they feel is so important about the act not passing? Well, I think they view it as a bar to people voting. You would have to get a driver's license. You have to pay for that or get a passport, a hundred and something dollars to get a passport just to register to vote. There's also concerns that people whose names do not match up with their birth certificate could have problems registering. Women who changed their names when they got married would have to take an extra step, essentially, to prove that they are who their birth certificate says they are.

6:26Anthony Zurcher:And this is all just adding on to kind of the onerous kind of requirements to be able to exercise a constitutional right, which is to vote. Now, to get back, the reason why they're blocking this Homeland Security bill in the first place is that they want greater regulation, greater oversight of immigration enforcement officials. They want things like a mandate that if an immigration official comes to try to interview someone or to detain someone, they have to have a warrant to enter the premises. They want body cameras for immigration enforcement officials. They don't want them to be able to wear masks.

7:05Anthony Zurcher:They want him to have IDs on them. That's why they block this Homeland Security bill. What Donald Trump has said is that, well, just to pass the bill now, not only do you have to vote for funding ICE, you also have to vote for this election regulation law. And in addition, he's tacking on a requirement that there's a ban on transgender surgery for children and a ban on any transgender athletes in college sports. So he's kind of bundling a bunch of things in here into this one bill and demanding that no negotiation. Democrats have to sign off on this or the Republicans have to find a way to pass it without any kind of a Democratic support, which would require playing with parliamentary procedures in the Senate in a way that hasn't happened in decades.

7:55Yeah, the no negotiation stuff is interesting, isn't it? Because there are some Republicans who would be minded and that would be, I mean, in years gone by, perhaps decades gone by. There'd be talks, wouldn't there? And people would give a bit and take a bit and all the rest of it. And that's certainly how the Senate used to work. Now, Donald Trump, and we should listen to him saying this, actually. Donald Trump is very plain in his messaging, not to the wider nation, not to the Democrats, but actually to the Republicans about the stance they should be taking. I'm suggesting strongly to the Republican Party, don't make any deal on anything.

8:29The most important thing we can have is what's called the Save America Act. don't make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID and you have to be a citizen to vote you have to show citizenship to vote very easy to do the Democrats are fully to blame with the struggle the great American public is going through at the airport say going through a big struggle right now and we just put ice in charge and helping TSA the agents and they're working together so far very well I'd so

9:03Anthony Zurcher:So a couple of things here. First of all, Donald Trump has ordered ICE, which are those immigration enforcement officers, the federal officers, which are the ones that Democrats have been criticizing for excessive use of force during their immigration enforcement in places like Minneapolis. He has dispatched some of them to the airports to help the TSA, those folks who are screening bags, by doing other security duties like monitoring the exits, making sure that people have their IDs ready, all that sort of thing. So that's one component he says he's done here to try to relieve some of the weights at the airport.

9:38And one of the things Democrats say, isn't it, is that it'll affect minorities in particular and disenfranchise whole groups of people, to which the White House would say, really, why do you assume that some people are less capable of getting access to government ID than others? I mean, it's available to everyone who is a U.S. citizen. And it's fair to say, isn't it, that, I mean, there's a division, isn't there? I'm not sure this act is particularly well supported when people are specifically asked about the act. But the idea that people show some sort of ID to vote actually is quite popular, isn't it?

10:14Anthony Zurcher:If you see polling, I mean, polls add 60, 70, 80 percent public approval because, as you mentioned, Americans, most Americans need their ID to do a lot of things. I'm going to have to show an ID in order to get on a plane later today. And so it's not that big a deal. Actually, a lot of states do require identification to cast a ballot. Virginia, my home state right now, I have to show an ID to cast a ballot. Now, mind you, there are ways of getting around that. If you don't have an ID, you have to sign an affidavit, that sort of thing. But there are cases on the margins where people just don't have IDs.

10:54Anthony Zurcher:People don't have a driver's license. People don't have a passport. Only like 50 percent of Americans have passports right now. And I can think of my my 88 year old mother. She doesn't drive anymore. Her driver's license is expired. Her passport is expired. Someone would have to help her get to a DMV, a Department of Motor Vehicles, to get a new picture ID made in order to be able to to comply with this law. And there are other people, the elderly, the infirm, the people who just don't drive because they don't have a car. I mean, that's those are all obstacles, right, to to being able to exercise what is a fundamental constitutional right.

11:35Anthony Zurcher:And I think that's the Democratic criticism here is that it shouldn't be harder for some Americans to cast a ballot than it is for others. And as soon as you start putting these requirements up, it gets more and more so that certain people are pushed to the margins and are made less likely to be able to cast their ballots. And it's a really interesting one, isn't it, Anthony? It just seems to me that it could be that it puts out of business in the ability to vote some elderly people who might well be minded to vote Republican. It also has an impact on people who just can't be bothered, actually, just think, oh, what the heck?

12:10And who do those people tend to vote for in recent years? They tended to vote for Donald Trump. He's got people out of their shacks and into the voting booths in a way that people never managed to do before. And I just wonder, obviously, there are minority groups that the Democrats have traditionally depended on, particularly black voters who they feel will be impacted. And that then goes to the heart of that question, that actually the Democrats think it probably will be their people. But I think I think he's entirely right, actually, to suggest, Anthony, you can't know, can you, how this will play out?

12:50Anthony Zurcher:We have seen Donald Trump's done really well with low propensity voters in recent elections. So this could adversely affect Republicans as well as Democrats. There's no guarantee that this will redound to the benefit of Trump unless there is this massive group of undocumented illegal aliens who have been casting ballots, which Trump may seem to believe. But like I said, there hasn't been real evidence. And I think the state of Utah did an audit of all of the ballots cast recently and found only a handful of cases. I think maybe only one or two that had someone who was not a U.S. citizen voting.

13:30Anthony Zurcher:So, you know, we're talking about what is probably a relatively small number of undocumented people who who might be restricted by this, but a much larger number of people who we don't know what their their partisan affiliations are. And, you know, it almost makes me think, Justin, that Donald Trump, you know, maybe this is cynical, but, you know, doesn't care so much about getting this passed as finding a way of saying, well, there's fraud and that's why the Republicans aren't going to do as well in November. I mean, we saw when he lost in 2020, we saw when he won in 2016 but didn't win the popular vote, he said he blamed voter fraud for those results.

14:11Anthony Zurcher:He blamed undocumented migrants voting for those results. So in theory, this could be another effort to set up that sort of an explanation if the Republicans take it on the chin in November. And it's worth saying, isn't it, Anthony, while all of this is going on, in parallel, as it were, this question of mail-in ballots is being discussed, isn't it, in the Supreme Court? And as ever, the justices are having to consider what the founding fathers, what the Constitution actually means when it talks about an election day, etc., etc., and how that kind of translates to the modern world. So am I right in thinking that potentially mail-in voting is anyway potentially going to be reduced?

15:00Because it just sounds a bit chaotic at the moment.

15:03Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments in a case on a Mississippi law, a conservative Mississippi law, that would count certain mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day that were postmarked from before Election Day. And a lot of states do this. A lot of states have mail-in ballots, robust mail-in balloting provisions, and have for decades. Places like Colorado and Oregon and Washington have been doing it for quite some time. California famously now has pretty generous mail-in ballot provisions where millions of their ballots come in, and millions of those ballots come in even after Election Day, as long as they're postmarked by the time polls close.

15:45Anthony Zurcher:And what the court is considering is a challenge to whether these late arriving ballots can be accepted or not. And in theory, they could say, no, you have to have a ballot in the hands of the people who are counting by election day, no matter what, in order for them to be counted. And it's interpreting the Constitution. It's interpreting federal and federal law on how to run how to run elections. And, you know, I looked a little bit at those older arguments and it did seem like there there might be a majority on this conservative dominated court to restrict when mail in ballots are counting. But, you know, what the critics will say in response to that is that these are valid legal votes.

16:32Anthony Zurcher:These are votes that were cast before Election Day. And if you just throw them all out because there were delays in the Postal Service for however long, then you are preventing people from, again, exercising a constitutional right. But then, on the other hand, you know, with California, sometimes it's weeks before we know who won certain close elections because these ballots keep trickling in by the mail. OK, so what people will want to know, Anthony, is what is then going to happen? Is this going to pass or not? And in what terms is it going to pass? what will it actually mandate to happen? And I'll get you to answer those questions precisely in just a second.

17:06But we ought to listen first to a kind of flavour of what is going on on the Senate floor. The minority leader, Chuck Schumer, the Democrat, and the Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune. At a moment when war is consuming the Middle East, when costs are rising, when ice agents are terrorising our communities, and when job growth in America is weakening, MAGA Republicans have chosen to focus on voter suppression. We all know why Donald Trump wants this bill. He is afraid Republicans will lose in November. Trump says pass the SAVE Act and it will, quote, guarantee the midterms. Imagine manipulating the electoral process to try and make himself the winner when he thinks he's going to lose.

17:52Do Democrats hear themselves?

17:54Anthony Zurcher:Are they going to start boycotting libraries and airplanes and hotels for requiring a photo ID? Are they going to explain why they're perfectly justified in requiring photo ID for their political rallies? Why it's somehow an intolerable burden to ask people to show their photo ID when they go to vote. I expect they won't. They'll simply continue with their mindless partisan opposition to common sense ID requirements for federal elections. This is all about the blame game. I mean, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are trying to say they're the ones who want to fund the TSA agents, the people who screen bags to do security at the airport.

18:34Anthony Zurcher:And it's the other guy who is blocking it. And clearly the public is not happy about this. They're not happy about these long lines at airports. We love to travel. This is spring. You know, the spring break. A lot of people are jetting around the country. And this is a massive headache. And the public's getting angrier. And so you have Democrats and Republicans in the Senate trying to say, no, we're not the ones who are blocking this. It's the other person's fault. Now, you asked before we listened to that clip, Justin, what whether Donald Trump will get his way. And I guess this is this is another one of those issues of whether Trump is going to taco on this.

19:11Anthony Zurcher:Is he going to chicken out? Is he going to back down? Was he just taking kind of a big negotiating position in order to score political points like we discussed to have a messaging campaign heading into the midterms? Or is this a red line in the sand that he is going to keep this thing bottled up and keep the airport security lines long for as long as it takes in order to get this election law through? If you had to press me, I think he backs down eventually. I think he finds a way to save face just because this is, at least for the moment, I think the public is blaming him and the people in power, Republicans, more than they're blaming Democrats.

19:52Right. And on that subject, then, you lead us very naturally to the place we should probably end, which is something pretty staggering, actually, that has happened not in Mar-a-Lago itself, Donald Trump's Florida home, but in the surrounding district. Tell us what it is. Right.

20:13Anthony Zurcher:We've talked about special legislative elections in the past and how Democrats across the board seem to be overperforming their 2024 numbers in that presidential election year. And here we have a kind of a dramatic case. As you mentioned, it is a legislative district that covers Mar-a-Lago, where I was this weekend traveling with Donald Trump. It's a posh area, very wealthy, these massive resorts and big houses, kind of traditional Republican territory. I mean, Donald Trump lives there for crying out loud. Donald Trump won that legislative district in 2024 by 19 points. And then yesterday, Tuesday, we saw the Democrat, Emily Gregory, beat the Trump endorsed Republican candidate, John Maples, by a few percentage points, flipping that district to the Democratic Party.

21:07Anthony Zurcher:Another sign that when it comes time to cast ballots, Republicans are running into a buzzsaw across the country that Democrats are doing much better, not only much better than than polls even suggest, but much better than the 2024 results say. And in that election, more Republicans cast ballots, more registered Republicans cast ballots than Democrats. And the Democrats still won, which tells you that independents are breaking to the Democrats and maybe even some Republicans. So another bad sign for Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago home district. He voted by mail, actually, in that election just a few days ago and they lost.

21:48Yeah, he's never he's never suggested that he's consistent. And, you know, that's that's part of the man, isn't it? That's just the fact of Donald Trump. And Americans don't hold him to being consistent, it is fair to say. They just have a different standard for him. And the fact that he can be against mail in voting to the extent that he is, but also use it himself while it is still available, I suppose he would say that that is consistent because while you can do it, you may do it. But it doesn't it is not exactly the kind of political consistency that perhaps would have existed within an average conventional politician in the past.

22:22It's also proof, isn't it, Anthony, of what we were saying earlier, that people who are poorer tend now to vote Republican. And in 2024, a majority of those who voted who earned under$50 ,000, I think it was, voted Republican. And a majority of those who earned more than$100 ,000 voted Democrat. That was in the 2024 election from memory. And now, well, here you've got proof, haven't you? A lot of wealthy people, as you were saying, posh neighbourhood, but posh wealthy people, even registered Republicans, perhaps are increasingly liable to vote Democrat because they're put off by so much of what Donald Trump says and perhaps what he stands for as well.

23:05He's not going to like it, is it? I mean, it's in a sense. Well, obviously, it doesn't matter writ large in the politics of the nation. But the fact that it's Mar-a-Lago and the fact that it's that they they spent quite a lot of money, didn't they, trying to win it? It wasn't as if they just said, oh, we don't care. He's really it's going to rankle.

23:24Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, because it's Mar-a-Lago, I think in particular that is going to sting. And this is just one of a series of special elections. There was one that we talked about in a past episode in the Dallas, Texas area as well, where a Democrat swung a seat that was, again, double digit Republican in 2024. But this one, this one strikes clearly strikes close to home. So if he's asked about it, I suspect he will not not express any any level of pleasure in in this result. And they could find could lash out at whoever asked him. But, you know, that is that's that's Donald Trump. And I think this is another red, red flashing light for Republicans that the way this election year is shaping up, it is not going to be good for Republicans.