President Donald Trump on Monday told House Republicans, who were gathered in Florida for a policy retreat, that he expects the war in Iran will wrap up “quickly,” though he didn’t give a specific date or detail exactly what he wants to do before ending the hostilities. 

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil,” he said. “And I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion.”

Trump added later in his speech that the U.S. military “will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.”

During a press conference afterward, Trump said the U.S. military had struck 5,000 locations inside Iran but that he was holding off on bombing some of the country’s larger targets to see if its leaders would allow ships to safely travel through the Strait of Hormuz.

The danger of navigating the key shipping route during the war has been a factor in rising oil prices and other market volatility globally.

“We’ve left some of the most important targets for later in case we need to do it,” he said. “If we hit them, it’s going to take many years for them to be rebuilt, having to do with electricity production and many other things. So, we’re not looking to do that if we don’t have to.”

Trump said “when the time comes,” the U.S. Navy and undisclosed partners will escort ships through that narrow channel.

“I hope it’s not going to be needed,” he said. “But if it’s needed, we’ll escort them right through.”

Trump said he was “disappointed” that Iranian leaders over the weekend selected Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader. He is the son of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by military strikes shortly after the war began. 

Trump declined to answer if the country’s new leader could soon become the target of similar military action, saying that would be “inappropriate.”

No new laws without elections bill

Trump also focused on legislative requests for Congress during his speech and at the press conference, calling on House Republicans to restructure a bill they already passed that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and identification to cast a ballot, among other changes. 

Trump said he wants three additional elements written into a new bill. 

The first would be nationwide restrictions on mail-in ballots unless the person is a member of the military based overseas, someone with a disability, someone who is ill or someone who is traveling. 

Trump told GOP lawmakers to add in a provision that would lead to “no men in women’s sports” and language blocking transgender youth from surgery. 

“Now, that should be the easiest thing to get passed that you’ve ever had,” he said.

Trump said if the House GOP passed the reworked bill that Republicans would “win the midterms at levels that you can’t even believe.”

He expressed confidence that Senate Republicans would be able to move such a bill through that chamber, but didn’t detail how that would happen with the 60-vote legislative filibuster still in place. 

“We’re not going to sign a watered-down version like has been sent up there. Let’s go for the gold, and let’s just not accept anything else,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you what, I’m willing to just sort of say, I’m not going to sign anything until this is approved. I really am.”

Democrats unmoved

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during a floor speech earlier in the day that Trump’s position would not change Democrats’ minds that the legislation is “Jim Crow 2.0.”

“Donald Trump is saying, in effect, unless Congress helps him undermine democracy, he’s prepared to hold the rest of the country hostage,” Schumer said. “This is what he does. He’s a thug, He’s a bully. He can’t ever argue on the merits, so he threatens.”

Schumer said that would mean any bills Congress approves to try to lower the cost of living wouldn’t take effect. 

“No bill to bring down gas prices. No bills to make groceries more affordable. No bills to increase housing. Not until the Save Act passes. That’s what Donald Trump is saying,” Schumer said. “Democrats will make sure that never happens.”

OTTAWA, Kan. — When Kansas began requiring residents to prove their U.S. citizenship before voting more than a decade ago, Steven Wayne Fish tried and failed.

A first-time father in his 30s at the time, he wanted a say in debates over public school funding despite having never voted before. But Fish, who was born on a since-decommissioned Air Force base in Illinois, couldn’t find his birth certificate, leaving him unable to register for the 2014 general election.

A federal court eventually blocked the Kansas law following a lawsuit in which Fish was the namesake plaintiff. For years, the Fish legal case served as a warning to politicians who wanted voters to produce documents proving their citizenship.

That’s changing, as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress try to impose a similar proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement nationwide through a long-shot proposal called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or SAVE America Act.

Blue states would have a major tool to push back. Whether they would use it is less clear.

States have the power to set separate rules for state and local elections and to apply federal restrictions only on residents voting in federal races, according to interviews with more than a dozen election experts, officials and lawmakers. Operating two distinct election systems, a process called bifurcation, would give states more freedom over who can vote in races for governor, state legislature and other down-ballot contests.

Bifurcation would ensure that individuals like Fish could still cast a ballot in some contests, even if they couldn’t vote for members of Congress or president.

“It’s very strange and surreal,” Fish told Stateline about a potential national requirement during an interview on Tuesday in Ottawa, Kansas, where he works at a warehouse. Those looking back at his state, he said, will see “it did not work at all.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, states regulate the times, places and manner of federal elections, though Congress has the authority to override them. But Congress has far less authority over state and local elections.

Brandon Fincher, managing editor of the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice, said a national proof-of-citizenship requirement would likely generate interest in bifurcation. “I think it absolutely would,” said Fincher, who wrote a dissertation that found states are likely to adopt dual systems when their voter registration rules are threatened by federal mandates or court orders.

Bifurcation wouldn’t restrain Congress from imposing voting restrictions on federal elections. It also wouldn’t stop any changes Trump has threatened to make through executive order, but those would almost certainly face immediate challenges in federal courts. The president has no unilateral authority under the U.S. Constitution to direct how states run elections.

In the past 30 years, only a handful of states have tried a two-tier system, according to Fincher’s research. Costs and administrative barriers tend to discourage states from pursuing a dual system, election experts and officials said.

Kansas briefly had one more than a decade ago. It came amid legal fights over the state’s 2011 proof-of-citizenship law and allowed voters who signed a sworn statement that they were citizens, but didn’t provide documentation, to cast ballots for federal races but not in state and local elections.

Arizona is the only state that currently operates a two-tier system — requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in state and local races, but not in federal.

Still, the country is littered with current smaller-scale efforts and past examples where states operated multiple election systems.

More than 20 cities allow some form of noncitizen voting in local races, for example, even though only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, according to Immigrant Voting Rights, a site that tracks legal noncitizen voting. Before the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed universal suffrage to women, some states allowed women to vote in some contests but not all. And Maryland lawmakers are currently weighing a plan to bifurcate its elections for some absentee ballots.

Wren Orey, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project, said more proposals to bifurcate state and federal elections could follow any congressional action.

“We’re always going to see that any time there are major federal policy changes being considered that some states are going to consider, at the very least, a system where state and local elections don’t meet those requirements,” Orey said.

Maryland weighs ‘insurance policy’

In Maryland, state lawmakers are weighing bifurcating a small portion of their absentee ballots depending on the outcome of a looming U.S. Supreme Court case involving mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia offer so-called grace periods for ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day but arrive afterward, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Trump administration argues these ballots cannot be counted. A ruling in that case, expected later this year, will affect millions of Americans.

If the White House wins, twin bills being considered in Maryland’s House and Senate would direct election officials to tabulate all votes on those ballots except for federal offices.

Maryland state Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Democrat sponsoring one of the bills, called the legislation an “insurance policy.”

The sponsor of the Maryland House bill, Democratic state Del. Kris Fair, said lawmakers would have to wait and see on federal actions before deciding whether the bifurcation could be expanded to cover additional restrictions on voting, but he didn’t rule it out.

Fair said additional bifurcation would be a “complicated conversation.” But he added that Maryland legislators would always seek to reduce as many barriers to voting as possible while keeping elections safe and secure.

“Every time the federal government is acting, seeking to restrict access and seeking to disenfranchise voters, we are going to immediately look at the books and see how we can bring enfranchisement back to the largest number of Maryland voters that we can,” Fair said.

A national battle

Republicans face tremendous pressure from Trump, who has called for “nationalizing” elections, to act ahead of the midterms in November to decide control of Congress.

They say new nationwide election standards are needed to guard against voter fraud, though instances of fraud are very rare. Trump has long pushed the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen, and his administration has taken steps to keep attention focused on that race, including an FBI seizure of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, last month.

The SAVE America Act narrowly passed the U.S. House last week and has majority support in the Senate, but faces a likely filibuster that would take 60 votes to overcome — which it does not have. The measure would require the public to produce a U.S. passport or birth certificate in most cases to register to vote. It would take effect immediately if signed into law.

The Trump administration has cast anyone opposed to the legislation as motivated by a desire to cheat.

“They want illegal people and aliens in this country to be able to vote for them and to rob the United States citizens of their vote,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a news conference in Arizona last week.

US House approves bill mandating proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a written statement to Stateline that Trump is “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.”

Just a handful of years ago, some Republican legislators considered bifurcation in response to Democratic proposals during the Biden administration that sparked fears of a nationalized election system.

When a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 and 2022 tried to pass sweeping election legislation that included automatic voter registration, a conservative backlash led to the introduction of bills in some statehouses that sought to assert greater state authority over elections.

In 2023, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that since 2020, legislation had been offered in five states — Alaska, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Texas — that would have separated state and federal elections. One 2021 Alaska measure would have directed state officials to stop holding elections for president and Congress if new federal law created a significant conflict with Alaska regulations. No state moved forward with separating its elections.

“If the Federal Government nationalizes the election system, undermining the long tradition of mutual cooperation, or worse, the sovereign rights of a state to manage its internal election affairs, then Alaska should simply tell the federal government to run their own election, bifurcating the election process,” Mike Shower, a then-state GOP senator who sponsored the measure, wrote in a statement at the time.

Shower, now a candidate for lieutenant governor, didn’t respond to an interview request sent to his campaign.

Election officials predict complications

Whatever the motivation behind considering bifurcation, election officials and experts say the burden of running a dual system is high.

Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, called the scenario a “nightmare” for election administrators because they would have to implement state and federal requirements while paying for it all.

Jamie Shew, clerk of Douglas County, Kansas, an area that includes the sprawling University of Kansas campus, said an upcoming primary election there has about 113 ballot styles — variations of ballots that voters receive depending on where they live and what party they belong to. A bifurcated system would only increase that.

“It just adds this layer of administration and complication,” said Shew, a Democrat. “It’s one of those things that as an election administration keeps you awake, because do we have it right?”

Even setting aside bifurcation, enforcing a proof-of-citizenship requirement could be costly for election officials. Bob Page, the nonpartisan registrar of voters in Orange County, California — an area with about 3.2 million residents — estimates the additional cost in his jurisdiction could exceed $6 million a year.

Page told Stateline in an email that assuming each voter could be served in 10 minutes, his office would need 59 additional staff members. He emphasized that he takes no position on legislation and will implement any changes in the law.

In Douglas County, Shew said that as Congress has debated a proof-of-citizenship requirement, he’s heard from election officials around the country who want to know about Kansas’ experience. When the state law was in effect, Shew said, he hired two additional temporary staff members to help process voter registrations.

Despite serving a university community, Shew said many of the issues his office encountered involved older voters who couldn’t locate a birth certificate or had certificates with incorrect information. In one instance, a birth certificate for someone born at a house decades ago listed when a doctor showed up, but not the date of birth. In other cases, birth certificates spelled names incorrectly.

“There’s a lot of stuff we’re going to have to record,” Shew said of the proposed SAVE America Act requirements. “If you get 100 [voter] registrations in a day, I’m going to have to go back to bringing in temporary staff just to handle that amount of extra paperwork.”

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican running for governor, didn’t directly answer Stateline’s questions about whether he supports the SAVE America Act or has any concerns about the ability of election officials in the state to implement the measure if it becomes law. Schwab told The Associated Press in 2024 that Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship requirement “didn’t work out so well.”

In a short written statement to Stateline this week, Schwab noted only that Kansas has had a voter ID requirement — which is different from a proof-of-citizenship requirement — for more than a decade and that all states with one benefit.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican who championed the state’s proof-of-citizenship law while he was state secretary of state and personally defended it in court, didn’t answer questions from Stateline.

Fish, the Kansas resident who tried unsuccessfully to register to vote in 2014, said he eventually found his birth certificate in the back of a baby book, but not before it was too late for that election. A resident of Garnett, a city of about 3,200 people, Fish said he’s learned not to bring up the legal challenge often.

Many people don’t understand how it could happen to an average person, he said, adding they believe there must be a reason the person trying to register was at fault.

“It’s not really something you can change their minds on if they’re on that side,” Fish said.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump gives a speech at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump restated a call Tuesday for federal control over election administration across the country, undermining the structure outlined in the Constitution that empowers states to run elections.

For the second time in as many days, Trump indicated he wanted the federal government more involved in elections. The issue renews concerns over Trump’s expansion of presidential power, which critics of his second presidency have labeled authoritarian.

Speaking after a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office and surrounded by Republican leaders in Congress, he responded to a question about earlier comments on “nationalizing” election administration by indicating the lawmakers standing behind him should “do something about it.” 

“I want to see elections be honest,” he said. “If you think about it, the state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”

Trump repeated debunked claims that he lost the 2020 presidential election only because of election fraud, especially in large Democrat-leaning cities including Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit.

“The federal government should not allow that,” he said. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

The comments marked the second time in as many days that Trump has floated a federal takeover of election infrastructure and came after Republican leaders in Congress and the White House press secretary had downplayed his earlier remarks.

In a podcast interview released Monday, Trump said his party should “nationalize” elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Afternoon walkback

Reporters asked U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune at press availabilities Tuesday about Trump’s initial comments. 

Both avoided endorsing the view and sought to tie them to GOP legislation that would create a nationwide requirement that voters show proof of citizenship.

“We have thoughtful debate about our election system every election cycle and sometimes in between,” Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said. “We know it’s in our system: The states have been in charge of administering their elections. What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections. We need constant improvement on that front.”

“I think the president has clarified what he meant by that, and that is that he supports the SAVE Act,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said earlier Tuesday. “There are other views, probably, when it comes to nationalizing or federalizing elections, but I think at least on that narrow issue, which is what the SAVE Act gets at, I think that’s what the president was addressing.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also endorsed the GOP elections bill and said states and cities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections created a system that was rife with fraud. Reports of election fraud are exceedingly rare.

“There are millions of people who have questions about that, as does the president,” she said. “He wants to make it right and the SAVE Act is the solution.”

But Trump on Tuesday evening, with Johnson among those standing behind him, seemed to indicate a broader desire for the federal government to be directly involved with election administration.

2020 election history

Trump has a charged history with claims around election integrity.

His persistent lie that he won the 2020 election, despite dozens of court cases that showed no determinative fraud, sparked the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as his supporters sought to reverse the election results.

He has continued to make the claim since returning to office and spoke by phone with FBI agents who seized voting machines in Fulton County, Georgia, according to New York Times reporting, raising questions about his use of law enforcement to reinforce his political power.

Trump’s opponents, some of whom have said he is sliding toward authoritarianism in his second term, quickly rebuked his recent comments.

“Donald Trump called for Republican officials to ‘take over’ voting procedures in 15 states,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, wrote on social media. “People of all political parties need to be able to stand up and say this can’t happen.”

Walter Olson, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a statement that federalization of elections would be a bad idea on the merits, but Trump’s history raised additional concern and called for Americans to be “vigilant against any repeated such attempt before, during or after the approaching midterms.”

“This trial balloon for a federal takeover is not coming from any ordinary official,” Olson said. “It is coming from a man who already once tried to overturn a free and fair election because it went against him, employing a firehose of lies and meritless legal theories, and who repeatedly pressed his underlings, many of whom in those days were willing to say ‘no’ about schemes such as sending in federal troops to seize voting machines.”