Jonah Goldberg: Voter ID shouldn’t be this controversial
Jonah Goldberg February 11, 2026
Residents check in to participate in in-person absentee voting (early voting) at the Municipal Building on March 26, 2025, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson/Getty Images/TNS)
President Trump says that “Republicans” should “nationalize the election” or at least take over voting in up to 15 places where he says voting is corrupt. His evidence of fraudulent voting is that he lost in such places in 2020, and since it is axiomatic that he won everywhere, the reported results are proof of the fraud.
This is all delusional, narcissistic nonsense. But at this point, if you still claim it’s an open question whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election (he did), you’re immune to the facts or just lying — either about not having made up your mind or about what actually happened. So, I don’t see much point in relitigating an issue that was literally litigated in more than 60 courtrooms.
But Republicans’ inability simply to tell the truth about Trump’s lies makes talking about elections and election integrity infuriatingly difficult. One tactic is to assert that Trump didn’t say what he plainly said. “What I assume he meant by it is that we ought to pass — Congress ought to pass the SAVE Act, which I’m co-sponsor of,” is how Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, responded to questions about Trump’s remarks.
Before later correcting himself, Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, insisted the president never said he wanted to “nationalize” the elections. “Those are your words, not his,” he told reporters.
But Democrats are wrong to suggest that all of the difficulty is generated by Trump’s lies and the Republicans’ inability to reject them.
On Sunday, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California, given “that the Republicans have undermined confidence in elections and the integrity of elections,” why not have a photo ID requirement for voting?
Schiff responded by scoffing at the idea that Democrats should cave to “the distrust (Republicans) created in order to enact a voter suppression law, which is the SAVE Act.”
Now there are reasonable objections to proof-of-citizenship requirements in the SAVE Act, but the framing of both the question and the answer is flawed.
Americans — including large majorities of Democrats — have favored voter ID for decades. Since long before anyone dreamed Donald Trump would run for president, never mind get elected, the idea has been wildly popular. In 2006, 80% of Americans favored showing proof of ID when voting. The lowest support over the last two decades, according to Pew, was in 2012 when a mere 77% of Americans, including 61% of Democrats favored voter ID. Last August, Pew found that 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats favored having to provide government-issued ID when voting.
Two things have bothered me about Democratic opposition to voter ID. First is the claim that millions upon millions of Americans lack adequate ID. While it’s true that the SAVE Act’s provisions for providing proof of citizenship creates novel challenges — lots of people don’t have their birth certificates and many forms of ID don’t specify citizenship — Democrats were making this argument years before the citizenship issue ripened. (To be clear, evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers is scant to nonexistent.)
Regardless, if the problem is that huge numbers of “marginalized” people don’t have sufficient ID to vote, that also means they don’t have good enough ID for all manner of things. Indeed, I can think of few things more likely to marginalize someone than not having ID. You can’t get a credit card, buy or rent a home, apply for welfare benefits, travel by plane or open a bank account without identification. That’s some serious marginalization.
Second, if you want people to trust the integrity of elections and the sanctity of “our democracy” waxing indignant over the idea of presenting ID when democratic majorities favor it is an odd choice. It arouses the suspicion that there’s a reason for opposing such measures. Mostly thanks to Democratic initiatives, America has made it wildly easier to vote over the last three decades. Why is it so preposterous that new safeguards be put in place amid all of the mail-in and early voting?
My theory is that at some deep level there is a dysfunctional bipartisan consensus that lax voting rules benefit Democrats. That’s why Republicans want to tighten the rules and Democrats favor loosening them. The funny thing is, I think both sides have always been wrong. Indeed, as the demographics of parties’ coalitions have changed, the assumption has gotten sillier. Over the last decade, the GOP traded “high propensity” college-educated suburban voters for non-college low-propensity voters.
Yet both parties have intensified their delusions. Voter ID is not voter suppression, and requiring voter ID will not guarantee Republican victories. It’s just a reasonable idea, albeit in an unreasonable time.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 3, 2026.
Will Trump’s moves ever awaken conservatives?
Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency in ways that could change America forever, and not for the better.
His naked self-dealing, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political foes, turning on our allies, the casino-fication of the White House — none of it bodes well for the future of our democracy, setting precedents that other presidents on both sides of the aisle could very well continue.
But one of the most obvious things Trump has changed in politics is its concern with ideology and principle. The long-held philosophy that used to bind the Republican Party together is gone, because he simply didn’t have a use for it.
For conservatives, that’s been especially disorienting and troubling. It began with Trump’s disregard for the debt and deficit, and carried through to this term’s embrace of tariffs, or protectionism. His personal disinterest in what the Christian right used to call “family values” dismantled the evangelical base of the party. And his courting of white nationalists and antisemites changed the face of the party.
None of that has been enough, however, to move conservative lawmakers to significantly break with Trump or even call him out. They happily co-signed his tariffs, watched as he exploded the debt and the deficit, turned the other way at his criminality and immorality, and defended police-attacking insurrectionists at the Capitol. He even managed to tick off the Second Amendment crowd with his crackdown on guns at protests and in Washington.
None of this is conservative. But so long as they kept winning, cowardly Republicans not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger didn’t seem to care.
But now, with a new idea hatched, will Republicans finally remember their conservative roots?
On Monday, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting.” It was a startling suggestion for a party that’s always concerned itself with state’s rights and federalism.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said.
The call is in service of his election lie, of course, an answer to the non-existent scourge of voter fraud that rigged just the 2020 election and somehow not the 2016 or 2024 elections.
Except Trump is the one attempting the rigging. He’s tried to end mail ballots and voting machines, sued two dozen blue states for their voter rolls, embarked on a rare mid-decade redistricting campaign, dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and pardoned dozens of people who signed false election certifications for him in 2020.
It’s tempting to dismiss the idea as merely a self-soothing ramble, the nonsensical blurting of an old man still fixated on an imaginary injustice. But it should offend and worry everyone, not least of all Republicans.
Elections are held locally for good reason — it’s harder to rig them that way. The Constitution says states shall determine the times, places and manner of elections, for the explicit purpose of decentralizing and protecting their integrity. It’s the backbone of federalism.
But for House Speaker Mike Johnson it’s nothing to get worked up about. “What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections.”
But Democrats are rightly concerned, and preparing for potential “federal government intrusion” in the midterms. “This is now a legitimate planning category,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “It’s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility.”
Extraordinarily sad, indeed. But will it revive the dormant conservatism in the Republican Party? Will lawmakers remember their principles and patriotism? Or will they continue to sleep through Trump’s total remaking of America’s political system?
Maybe this will be the thing that finally wakes them up.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.