Kamala Harris has now accused Republicans of “cheating by purging voter rolls.” Stop and think about how insane American politics has become when maintaining an accurate voter-registration database can be casually described as cheating. The controversy concerns efforts to remove people who are no longer eligible or properly registered, including noncitizens, deceased voters, duplicates, and people who have moved. Federal elections are already restricted to American citizens. That is not some new Trump invention.
What I cannot comprehend is why this has become partisan at all. Only citizens may vote in federal elections. Why should anyone care whether that citizen votes Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or writes Donald Duck on the ballot? Verify that the person is eligible, protect the legitimate voter from being wrongly removed, count the legal vote, and move on. Instead, Washington has managed to transform even the basic question of WHO IS ELIGIBLE TO VOTE into another tribal political war.
The SAVE America Act would go considerably further by requiring documentary proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections and photo identification when voting. Supporters argue that citizenship should actually be verified rather than merely attested to. Critics point out that millions of legitimate American citizens may not readily possess the required documents and warn that poorly designed verification systems can prevent eligible citizens from registering. Both issues can exist simultaneously. Noncitizens should not vote, and citizens should not be stripped from voter rolls because an incompetent government database cannot recognize that someone became a naturalized American.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says audits generally find extremely small numbers of noncitizens registered or voting. That does not mean the law should simply be ignored because violations are uncommon. Bank fraud is relatively uncommon compared with legitimate transactions, but nobody argues that banks should therefore stop verifying who owns an account. The objective should be a system where every eligible citizen can vote and nobody who is legally ineligible can cast a ballot.
What should outrage people is that politicians have turned confidence in elections into another weapon against one another. Democrats warn that Republicans are suppressing legitimate voters. Republicans warn that Democrats are protecting ineligible registrations. Then both sides scream “cheating” before an election has even taken place. That is how confidence in the entire system is destroyed because whichever side loses has already been handed an excuse to claim that the rules themselves were illegitimate.
The United States has Social Security records, passport records, immigration records, naturalization records, state driver’s license databases, death records, tax records, and more. Washington can track your income to make sure you paid every penny of tax, yet somehow verifying that an individual is an eligible American voter has become an impossible philosophical question. Government knows when you owe it $600, but suddenly becomes helpless when asked to maintain an accurate voter-registration database.
When politicians start calling ordinary election administration “cheating,” while the other side casually implies enormous fraud without evidence, they are playing with something far more important than the next election. A republic survives only as long as the public believes that political power can change hands through legitimate elections. Destroy that confidence long enough and people eventually stop believing that elections settle anything at all. That is the path politicians on BOTH sides should be terrified of creating.