House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries explained Democrats’ opposition to national voter ID and the “SAVE Act,” which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, during a CNN interview Sunday morning:

DANA BASH, CNN: I want to turn to a big debate about elections. The president said this week that — or this past week that he wanted to nationalize elections at the White House and on Capitol Hill. They say that what they mean legislatively is pushing what they call the SAVE Act, which would mandate Americans show proof of citizenship like a birth certificate and also potentially more information about the registration to vote. Now, I understand you don’t support things like a passport, for example, but requiring basic I.D. in order to vote is really popular. A Pew poll from a few months ago showed 83 percent of Americans, including 71 percent of your fellow Democrats, support requiring an I.D. to vote. Why are they wrong? JEFFRIES: I haven’t said that they’re wrong. We know that states are the ones who are empowered to conduct elections, and every state should be allowed to decide the best way to proceed to ensure that there’s a free and fair election. Here in New York, there are in fact voter identification requirements. The question is that what Republicans are trying to do is to engage in clear and blatant voter suppression. They know that, if there’s a free and fair election in November, they’re going to lose. In fact, Republicans have been losing every single election since Donald Trump was sworn in, in January of last year, including most recently decisively in Texas, and, of course, losing all across the country up and down the ballot in the November off-year elections in places like New Jersey or Virginia or New York. BASH: Yes, and they have been losing, I mean, Virginia is a good example. They have a requirement to show your I.D., and Democrats won very, very handily across the way. So why not maybe even just take that off the table and say, OK, maybe not a passport or birth certificate, but show I.D.? JEFFRIES: Well, first of all, every state is empowered to be able to make the decision on their own, and we completely and totally support that. What Donald Trump wants to do is try to nationalize the election, translation, steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen. We stopped them in terms of their gerrymandering efforts, where they were going to try to redraw congressional maps in red states throughout the nation, not expect Democrats to respond forcefully, and try to rig them in terms. They failed. We have stopped Donald Trump from being able to federalize the National Guard, which we believe was probably part of some toxic attempt to unleash troops on American cities all across the nation and intimidate people from voting, and we’re going to stop him from nationalizing the election. This is going to be a free and fair election. It’s going to be conducted like every other election, where states and localities have the ability to administer the laws.

RealClearPolitics Videos