Thursday night, President Trump confirmed what the average American has suspected for years: our elections are not as secure as Washington, D.C., has told us they are.

He declassified intelligence showing China acquired 220 million American voter files — names, addresses, party preferences — and assigned a dedicated unit to exploit them. He released assessments proving our own government has long known our voting machines and ballot-counting systems are exposed to attack from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — and buried it. And the Department of Homeland Security found more than a quarter of a million noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections.

It gets worse. The CIA obtained reporting showing Venezuela’s Maduro regime developed methods to digitally rig its own 2020 elections — altering vote totals in ways no audit could detect. And FBI files describe a 2020 voter-registration operation in Michigan where canvassers admitted to signing forms in other people’s names, inventing registrants who never existed, and getting paid in gift cards by the application.

This should alarm every American — and is exactly why the Republican National Committee is leading the fight to protect the ballot box.

For years, Democrats dismissed every one of these concerns as a conspiracy theory. But President Trump presented voters with the truth and proved what Republicans have been saying all along.

Voter rolls padded with noncitizens and dead people are unacceptable. Foreign governments holding information on hundreds of millions of American voters is inexcusable. Democrats blocking voter ID, again and again, is indefensible.

America is the greatest nation on earth, and our elections should be the gold standard. The president’s message was simple: secure elections start with voter ID, proof of citizenship, and accurate voter rolls. That’s why Congress must pass the SAVE America Act.

This commonsense legislation is not radical. The Democrats opposing it are. The polling is not close: 68% of voters back the bill — including two-thirds of independents and nearly half of Democrats. Eighty-one percent support voter ID and 87% agree that only American citizens should decide American elections.

It’s a national embarrassment that Democrats keep blocking safeguards much of the world already has. India and Brazil tie voter identification to a biometric database. Germany and Canada count paper ballots. Here, we run on the honor system. Requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote, ensuring clean voter rolls, and strengthening protections against ballot tampering is not only reasonable — it’s the bare minimum.

Here at the RNC, we’re not waiting on Congress — we heard the president’s call loud and clear. We’re leading the largest election integrity operation in Republican Party history — 160 active cases across 36 states. We fought to strike down New York City’s noncitizen voting law. We’re defending Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement at the Supreme Court. We uncovered hundreds of noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls.

We are also deploying a massive election integrity ground game in 22 target states, training poll workers and watchers, recruiting attorneys, observing machine testing and ballot-processing activities, and building the infrastructure needed to win. The SAVE America Act would only strengthen those efforts and help ensure the election vulnerabilities exposed by President Trump never happen again.

We do this because Americans deserve complete confidence in our elections. We deserve to know our ballot is protected, our vote is counted, and the process is free from interference. That’s exactly what the RNC is fighting for every single day.

As President Trump said, “Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world.” He is right. Secure elections are not a Republican issue — they are an American one. Congress should pass the SAVE America Act. And even if Democrats keep blocking it, the RNC will keep fighting in every courtroom in the country, because Americans deserve elections they can trust. You can join the fight with us and help secure our elections at protectthevote.com.

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Joe Gruters is chairman of the Republican National Committee.

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We Can’t Let China (Or Anyone Else) Invade Our Elections