Donald Trump has stumbled on the unlikely blueprint for his vision of a "broken" voting process in the United States and it lies 8,000 miles away in New Delhi. The US president has been constantly referring to India's electoral system over the last several days, urging Congress to approve the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to present photo IDs to cast their ballots in person, while America, he said, simply cannot get its act together. At social events and in a post on the Truth Twitter, the remark attributed the Chief Election Commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, to asking the U.S. officials in private when they conducted elections without a photo ID. That's a comparison they can do for India's benefit, poking fun at Trump's critics at home, and glossing over the fact that the two democracies are very different in their construction.

The numbers Trump quoted are not incorrect. In the last general elections in India, about 646 million voters participated, totaling less than one percent of which were through the mail. Each voter required a valid identity card which was usually the Elector's Photo Identity Card, issued for free by the Election Commission of India. That is a single constitutional body that has jurisdiction over all seats in the Lok Sabha and all state assemblies, and that has a continuous electoral roll that is updated and audited throughout the year instead of being created afresh every time the elections roll around. About two-third of India's 1.05 million polling stations are fitted with EVM machines along with a paper audit trail, which are bought and standardised at the national level, with each EVM machine costing between 7,000 and 16,000 rupees and the total expenditure on elections coming in at thousands of crores in a year.

There is obviously no such thing in the United States and that is where the comparison falls apart. More than ten thousand state and county offices run American elections, each with its own rules concerning voter registration, identification and mail voting, rules that stem from the federalist principle that left elections largely to the states, not a federal authority. There is no national identity card, no single enrollment data base and no replacement for India's Aadhaar-linked deduplication drive which has already captured biometric information linked to over 660 million voter records. Creating anything that looks like India's centralized model would either involve a constitutional change few in Washington would dare to try or it would be resisted in court by individual states, especially those with Democratic-led governments, like California, New York and New Jersey.

The genuine resistance is the conflict this is really about and Trump's rhetoric is nothing but a cover. The SAVE America Act, which would call for proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, for registering to vote at federal elections and requiring voters to present photo IDs at the polling place, has languished in the Senate for months. The Republicans still have only a majority of fifty-three votes, far short of the sixty they would need to break a filibuster, and tried to ram a narrower version through in July, and it didn't work out only fifty-two voted for it. House Democrats, headed by the Congressional Black Caucus's chair, Yvette Clarke, say it's a suppression bill in the guise of security legislation, and that tens of millions of Americans many of them Black, Hispanic, and lower-income do not have easy access to a passport or a certified birth certificate and might not be able to register at all. Republicans, on the other hand, argue that there is no need to be more stringent with the measure, given the polling data indicating that the vast majority of Americans, regardless of party, want to have some form of voter ID in theory, but are far split on the details.

The long-term economic and technological history understory is lost in that argument. India's electoral scale has in the shadow of the spotlight quietly become one of the largest identity verification ecosystems on the planet that it's now exporting to banks, insurers and gig-economy platforms across Southeast Asia and the Gulf, with voter card data as one layer among several in real-time background checks. It's that much more a reason that the elections in India are conducted smoothly than the ink on the finger of Mr. or Mrs. voter during polling day. There is nothing like this at a national level in the U.S., and the project would require the kind of upfront investment in technology, at the level of billions of dollars, that neither side in Washington has seemed willing to make particularly given that elections in the U.S. already are much more expensive than those in India. Close to sixteen billion dollars were spent on campaigns in the 2024 US election cycle, compared to the amount spent by India on the administration of an election to a population nearly three times as large.

The dimension of trust that can't be quantified is also there. The legitimacy of the system rests on a neutral and independent Election Commission that both the major national parties are grudgingly accepting, and have been doing so for 70 years now, in India. In America, election administration, however, is now partisan politics gone awry, with both sides casting doubts on the motives of the opposing side but not on the process itself; since 2020. When voting rights are imported with that underlying institutional trust, there is a risk of solving the wrong problem.