WA doesn’t need feds to ‘fix’ our successful election system

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 30, 2026

The state of Washington has one of the most successful, fraud-free voting systems in the nation. Republican leaders in Washington, D.C., want to tear it down with a two-pronged attack against voting rights.

The first prong comes from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. They are pushing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which passed the House in February. It is stalled but very much alive in the Senate.

If the SAVE Act becomes law, it would require voters to present identification when they vote. That might seem easy enough to people who remember the days when voters showed up at polling places, but when voting by mail, people would have to include a photocopy of their ID with their ballot.

That might not be a big deal for people who own a printer that can make copies, but a lot of people lack easy access to such technology. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who oversees the state’s elections, put it bluntly to Seattle’s KOMO News, “Does your 80-year-old mom have a copy machine at home? Because mine doesn’t.”

Neither do many college students, tribal members, low-income Washingtonians and rural residents.

The ID requirement would be expensive for taxpayers, too. Hobbs estimates the cost to the state could reach $39 million just in November’s midterm elections. The Legislature did not include those funds in the budget it recently passed.

Besides, Washington already verifies identity through signature matching. The current system has allowed no significant, documented fraudulent voting.

The SAVE Act also would require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote. Anyone without a passport or easy access to their birth certificate will likely face costly, time-consuming work gathering the right records. The burden is compounded for voters who changed their names through marriage and would therefore need to provide additional documentation.

The second prong of the Republican-led attack on voting lies in a U.S. Supreme Court case challenging the widespread practice of counting mailed ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received later. The court recently heard oral arguments in the case, and its conservative majority seemed ready to ban such ballot grace periods.

Washington allows 20 additional days, and 127,000 ballots arrived during the grace period for the 2024 general election.

Ballot grace periods originated, in part, as an accommodation for members of the military serving abroad. Sometimes international mail takes longer than expected to arrive. States like Washington were willing to give them extra time if a postmark proved that the ballot had been cast on or before Election Day.

Surely all Americans can agree that we should seek to make voting easier for the people who risk their lives in defense of their country, not harder.

Domestic mail faces new delays, too. The U.S. Postal Service is consolidating its mail processing at regional sorting facilities. Tri-Cities mail is processed in Spokane. That can add a day or two to the time it takes to deliver an envelope from mailbox to postmark to destination.

If either or both of those efforts succeed, the federal government would roll back decades of progress in making voting accessible to working families, seniors, rural residents, Americans living overseas and members of the armed forces.

Washington’s county and state election officials must respond aggressively by educating voters about the changes and encouraging them to mail their ballots earlier or drop them off at a ballot box instead.

Counties also should expand the number of secure ballot drop boxes available in communities. Under state law, counties must maintain at least one drop box per 15,000 registered voters and one in every city or town with a post office.

Last year, Benton County had 12, and Franklin County had eight. Nothing in the law says they and other counties cannot have more. Make them as accessible as possible.

Washington’s mail voting and ballot grace period have been a success. Voter turnout consistently outpaces the national rate. In the 2024 presidential election, Washington turnout was 9 percentage points higher than nationally.

This is a state that believes government should make sure all eligible citizens can vote without needless barriers. We must not abandon that goal, even as Washington, D.C., tries to make it harder to participate in democracy.