New York City’s lone Republican in Congress accuses Mamdani, Schumer of 'hypocrisy' in voter ID fight

Nicole Malliotakis has a point that's almost too obvious to need saying, which is exactly why it's worth saying. Zohran Mamdani campaigned on requiring ID to enter city buildings and access certain services in New York, a position plenty of his own coalition would call reasonable if you stripped the name off it. Meanwhile Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats have spent years treating the SAVE Act, a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, like it's some kind of Jim Crow revival. You can't have it both ways. Either verifying who someone is before they access a public system is a basic administrative safeguard, or it's the voter suppression scheme Democrats claim it is every time Republicans propose it.

The dodge here is familiar. ID requirements are fine when they're about entering a courthouse or picking up a benefit, but suddenly become an existential threat to democracy the moment they touch a ballot box. Nobody's actually against verification as a concept. What they're against is verification applied to elections, because that's the one place where the current setup benefits them. Malliotakis calling this hypocrisy isn't a gotcha, it's just an accurate description.

None of this means voter ID solves every problem in American elections. But the argument for it gets a lot stronger when the people fighting it can't even keep their own position straight from one policy area to the next. If ID checks are common sense for city services, they're common sense for the ballot too. Voters can tell the difference between a principled objection and a convenient one, and this looks a lot like the latter.