This week at Democracy Docket: To pass SAVE, Trump targets trans people — while Texas Republicans try a voter suppression test run

President Donald Trump and his allies are doing everything they can — and we mean everything — to somehow get their monster voter suppression bill through Congress. And no one is covering this epic fight as closely as Democracy Docket.

Even as he launched an illegal and unpopular attack on Iran, Trump was demanding lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act, as Democracy Docket’s Jim Saksa reported Monday. “We are either going to fix [our elections] or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. By Thursday, as Jim noted, Trump was calling the measure “a Country Defining fight for the Soul of our Nation” and saying it must be passed “at the expense of everything else.” The same day, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton offered to drop his Senate bid, sparing the GOP a divisive primary runoff, if the SAVE Act is approved, calling it “the most important bill the U.S. Senate could ever pass.”

Then Friday, the coup de grace: As Democracy Docket’s Yunior Rivas reported, the White House confirmed it has added to the bill two non-elections provisions that target trans people, as well as a ban on no-excuse mail voting. As hateful as they are, the anti-trans provisions are popular with Republican voters — so the idea seems to be to ratchet up the pressure on Senate GOP leaders to ram SAVE America through despite an all-but-certain Democratic filibuster. 

Whether the gambit will succeed is impossible to say — but it leaves no doubt that getting the SAVE America Act to his desk in order to radically restrict voting is Trump’s top priority.

As well as staying on top of the week’s most important story, we also broke a few pieces of news. Yunior scooped a troubling new effort by the Trump Department of Justice to press states to tighten the rules for military and overseas voters — part of a broader GOP attack on these voters underway since last year.

And Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen revealed that a GOP lawyer for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — a federal panel that’s meant to help states fairly and efficiently run their elections — last fall gave a briefing to Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting group, at a time when it was lobbying the agency to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form. 

There were also some elections last week, and Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice picked up on two ominous storylines from Texas. 

First, Jen explained how the chaos that kept large numbers of Democratic primary voters from the polls in two Lone Star State counties was the clear result of GOP-driven changes to the voting process. And how, in what may be a test run for voter suppression in November, Paxton, the state AG, successfully urged the Texas’ GOP-controlled Supreme Court to block a ruling that aimed to address the problems by extending voting hours. 

Separately, Jen also revealed how a GOP lawyer who could be headed to Congress after winning his contested primary this week was a key architect of the Texas redistricting scheme that set off the nationwide maps battle still underway — something that has largely flown below the media radar.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified before Congress (before she was humiliatingly ousted later in the week). As Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson wrote, Democrats pressed Noem to rule out the idea of putting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the polls this fall — and she notably declined to do so.

Finally, a part-fun, part-horrifying followup to our earlier reporting on the draft executive order that far-right activists are pushing Trump to sign, which aims to let him take over elections by declaring a national emergency.

Matt unearthed new comments from Peter Ticktin, one of the key advocates for the scheme, who last week provided us with an early version of the draft order. As the basis for the emergency he wants Trump to declare, Ticktin, speaking Monday to a conference of election deniers, cited a long-debunked conspiracy theory about voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.

“This is the most important topic that I speak of at this time,” Ticktin, a conservative lawyer and long-time friend of Trump, as well as an amateur poet, told the crowd. “Because all of our fates are up for grabs right now, if those machines are allowed to be used in the 2026 midterms.”