Trump promises to impose ID requirements on every voter

3 months ago 21

US President Donald Trump has declared he will issue an executive order to require voter identification from every voter, while he has also appointed a self-styled investigator who made false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election to a new role at the Department of Homeland Security.

“Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Also, No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military.”

President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia this weekend.

Trump has long questioned the US electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. The president and his Republican allies also have made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and rarely occurs.

The MIT Election Data + Science Lab says voter ID has been a source of political controversy in the United States for nearly two decades, and rules vary widely from state to state.

Under the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), all first-time voters in federal elections in every state must show some form of ID at the polls if they registered by mail, but not if they registered in person. States are allowed to add identification requirements beyond this “HAVA minimum”, and a number of states in the south and Mid West require strict photo ID for all voters.

Supporters argue that strict ID requirements will deter voter fraud and instil confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, while opponents argue it disenfranchises poor voters.

Earlier in August, Trump pledged to issue an executive order to end the use of mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. However, federal elections are administered at the state level, and it is unclear whether the president has the constitutional power to enact such a measure.

An election worker scans an envelope that holds a voting machine memory card at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Centre in Atlanta last November.

The midterm elections on November 3, 2026 will be the first nationwide referendum on Trump’s domestic and foreign policies since he returned to power in January. Democrats will be seeking to break the Republicans’ grip on both the House of Representatives and the Senate to block Trump’s domestic agenda.

Trump has also appointed a self-styled conservative election investigator to an election integrity role at the US Department of Homeland Security last week.

Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey, whose faulty findings on voter data were used by Trump to contest the 2020 election, is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, an organisational chart on its website shows. The role did not exist under former president Joe Biden.

Honey runs an investigations and auditing consulting firm called Haystack Investigations, according to her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she also has led various election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fuelled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.

The claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election were one of the drivers of the insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6 2021.

In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on January 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the US Capitol to try to prevent Biden from becoming president.

In 2022, Honey’s organisation Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all. Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots.

In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in populous Maricopa County. The audit was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology, yet after six months of searching for evidence of fraud, it still came up with a vote tally that confirmed Biden’s win.

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections and based on that experience, she was “not a serious auditor”. He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Centre for Election Innovation and Research, said DHS used to have real credibility in its advisory role on elections, but the agency had fired its “real experts” and also done away with much of its work tracking foreign influence campaigns targeting voters.

“What I’m concerned about is that it seems like DHS is being poised to use the vast power and megaphone of the federal government to spread disinformation rather than combat it,” Becker said.

Neither Honey nor DHS responded to requests for comment.

Reuters, AP