Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Nothing else matters without secure elections. It is the very foundation of this republic, which just turned 250 this year. Two and a half centuries ago, a handful of farmers and lawyers signed their names to a document declaring that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed."
In America, the governed are American citizens. When someone who is not a citizen casts a ballot, he is not adding his voice to that consent. He is canceling out a vote that rightfully belongs to a citizen.
Every fight we have in Washington over taxes, over the border, over the price of groceries, rests on one question: are the people casting ballots the people entitled to cast them?
The state of Indiana figured this out before almost anyone else.
In 2005, our legislature passed the first photo ID law for voting in the country. The requirement was simple: you had to show an ID to vote. Immediately, the Indiana Democratic Party and the Marion County Democratic Central Committee sued; the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2008 the Court upheld it.
Today, your ID has to show your photo and your name as it appears on your registration. It has to be current or recently expired. And it has to be issued by the State of Indiana or the federal government.
But our state didn't stop there. In 2023, we extended ID requirements to absentee ballots. In 2024 and 2025, we began cross-checking the statewide voter file against BMV records to flag registrants who were not citizens when their credential was issued. Those voters have 30 days to confirm citizenship and stay on the rolls. Last year we stopped the use of state college and university student IDs at the polls. Those cards are issued by schools, not by the government, and many of them never expire.
The Heritage Foundation now ranks Indiana among the top ten states in the nation for election integrity, and names it one of only four states to improve its score by double digits since 2021.
The Hoosier state should not be the exception in this country. We should be the standard.
That is why I have voted for the SAVE America Act every time it has come to the floor. The bill does two things, and neither is radical. It requires documentary proof of citizenship when you register to vote in a federal election. And it requires a valid government-issued photo ID when you cast that ballot.
You need a photo ID to drive a car. To open a bank account. To rent a hotel room. To buy medicine or a beer. To board a plane. To donate blood. To sign up for federal benefits. If an ID is required to give blood, it ought to be required to pick a President of the United States.
Around Indiana, the Hoosiers I talk to consider this plain common sense, and most of the country agrees with us. Gallup found 84 percent of Americans support requiring photo ID to vote, and 83 percent support proof of citizenship when registering for the first time.
Yet what is common sense in Indiana's Second District is treated as an outrage in places like California and New Jersey. When the SAVE America Act came to the floor in February, every House Republican voted for it and all but one Democrat voted against it.
Securing every citizen's vote should not be a partisan issue. Americans deserve an election system that is easy to vote in and hard to cheat in.
In Indiana we built one the slow way, year after year, law after law, through lawsuits and legislative sessions and a decision from the highest court in the land. It took time and it took work, and we did it because Hoosiers deserve elections they can trust.
There is no more important work Congress can do than securing and safeguarding our elections. The Senate must pass the SAVE America Act so that what we built here becomes the gold standard across the nation.
