By Joshua Arnold

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday leveled a scurrilous attack against a bill designed to safeguard the integrity of federal elections by requiring all voters to show proof of citizenship. “It’s Jim Crow 2.0,” Schumer growled on MS Now’s “Morning Joe,” in comments he proudly posted to his own website. “What they’re trying to do here is the same thing that was done in the South for decades to prevent people of color from voting.” The smear is offensive, illogical, and utterly disproven by events — not to mention outdated.

In these comments, Schumer ascribed the base motive of racism to lawmakers who support the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act” (H.R. 22). Common charity would assume that, as its title suggests, the bill sought to safeguard the eligibility of American voters by excluding ineligible voters. But Schumer alleged a more sinister motive — one he struggled to support with available facts.

The case Schumer made rested on the assumption that eligible voters would fail to obtain the proper ID. “For instance,” he began, “if you’re a woman who got married and changed your last name, you won’t be able to show ID, and you’ll be discriminated against. If you can’t find a birth certificate or a proper ID, you’ll be discriminated against. This is vicious and nasty.”

Schumer’s story envisioned unfortunate scenarios in which eligible voters were unable to vote because of paperwork snafus. Yet, despite the plausibility of these tales — it can take months for married women to straighten out their ID paperwork — these worst-case scenarios rarely, if ever, prevent a legal voter from casting a legal ballot. This is the very reason why provisional ballots exist — to help legal voters cast a ballot, even if they are missing documents on Election Day.

Schumer also imagined a scenario in which eligible voters simply could not obtain the necessary documentation, but he did not explain how such an inability was possible. The SAVE Act provides at least five different documentation options that would satisfy its requirements, much like the list of documents required for work authorization. Surely any American citizen would be able to obtain a qualifying document. By calling this requirement “Jim Crow 2.0,” did Schumer mean to insinuate that black Americans are uniquely disadvantaged at obtaining proof of citizenship?

In terms of actual numbers, the left-wing Brennan Center estimated in 2023 that at least 3.8 million Americans do not have proof-of-citizenship documents. In the 2024 election, nearly 90 million eligible Americans did not vote. Again, the U.S. State Department said in 2025 that there were nearly 170 million valid U.S. passports in circulation, while more than 150 million Americans voted in 2025.

It’s hard to build a case that lack of proper documents will keep Americans from voting when there are already more qualifying documents in circulation than the number of Americans who do actually vote, and when the number who lack documentation is far smaller than the number who do not vote.

Yet there is a population living in the United States who would find it difficult to obtain documents proving their citizenship, whether by Election Day or any other time frame — namely, non-citizens, who have no right to vote in federal elections. That is the point of a photo ID requirement for voting.

Another fact suggests that Leader Schumer is too smart to buy his own propaganda. If the SAVE Act really was “Jim Crow 2.0” — a backward-facing travesty of unspeakable magnitude — then the responsible thing to do would be to bury the issue, even if it meant compromising on a less important point.

Instead, Schumer led the Senate Democrats to trigger a partial government shutdown last Friday, scuttling his own bipartisan spending package in a gambit to get more concessions on immigration enforcement. This only vaulted the SAVE Act to greater prominence, as conservative Republicans raised it as a counterpoint to Democratic demands. ON Monday, Schumer was forced to declare, “Speaker Johnson should tell SAVE Act Republicans to stand down or else this shutdown will be on them.” Republican leadership did convince the “SAVE Act Republicans” to “stand down” over the funding debate, but that may have required assurances that the issue would receive separate attention.

In fact, the phrase “Jim Crow 2.0” is not original to Schumer in this political moment. Back in 2021, then-President Joe Biden leveled the accusation against a Georgia election integrity bill, meant to address concerns in that state’s problematic 2020 election. Biden compared the bill’s supporters to the worst villains of segregation: George Wallace, Bull Connor, even Jefferson Davis. Yet his claims about the bill were so erroneous that The Washington Post awarded him four “Pinocchios.” Biden’s DOJ sued Georgia, and major corporations briefly boycotted the state in a frenzy of ill-founded media outrage.

However, the naysayers were disproven in 2022, when Georgia’s election security measures resulted in a cleaner, more trustworthy election process. In a post-election survey conducted by the University of Georgia, exactly zero black voters in the state rated their personal voting experience as “poor,” and the election set an all-time high for turnout in a midterm.

“We’re not reviving Jim Crow all over the country,” Schumer asserted. “And when the American people hear what exactly it [the SAVE Act] is doing and what its intent is doing, they’re gonna be against it, as well.”

The bulk of the American people have a different opinion. In a Pew Research Survey published in August 2025, 83% of Americans favored “requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote,” while only 16% opposed this policy. The policy enjoyed overwhelming majorities across political and ethnic lines, enjoying the support of 71% of Democrats, 95% of Republicans, 76% of blacks, 77% of Asians, 82% of Hispanics, and 85% of whites.

In fact, of all 10 election-related proposals in the survey, requiring photo ID to vote was the second-most popular policy, one point behind “requiring electronic voting machines to print a paper backup of the ballot.”

It should be obvious why large majorities of ordinary American citizens, of every political affiliation or ethnic background, favor voter ID laws. It’s because they are voters who understand that such laws protect their own votes. The only people who benefit from removing voter ID requirements are those who plan to cast ballots illegally, whether they are non-citizens trying to vote or citizens trying to cheat.

Voter ID requirements make it easy to vote but hard to cheat, and the American people are strongly in favor of such policies.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.