TOI correspondent from Washington: United States President Donald Trump has apparently discovered the solution to America’s notoriously fickle and complicated election system: Ask India.In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump cited purported remarks by India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar questioning how Americans can conduct elections without requiring photo identification. Trump noted that about 646 million Indians voted in the last general election, with less than 1 per cent voting by mail, and every voter was required to have valid identification to argue: “We need to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, now!” US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor promptly agreed with Trump in a follow-up post.The hotly-contested Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would require documentary proof of US citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and establish national photo-ID requirements. It has passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives but repeatedly stalled in the Senate, where Republicans lack the 60 votes to overcome the filibuster. Even some Republicans have baulked at pushing it through without broader support.MAGA principals say the measure is simple: only citizens should vote, and the government should verify that they are citizens. Democrats and voting-rights groups counter that federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, documented cases of noncitizen voting are exceedingly rare, and MAGA fear-mongering that millions of non-citizens are voting have been repeatedly disproven.That has produced an inevitable political fracas: critics believe the law’s practical effect would be to disproportionally disenfranchise poor, minority, elderly and other voters – which they say is the MAGA game plan – because these groups tend to vote Democratic.So while Republicans call that accusation partisan scaremongering, opponents call it voter suppression dressed up as election security. They argue that the bill creates paperwork barriers for legitimate voters who may lack passports, birth certificates or other acceptable documents, or whose names differ between documents.According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan policy institute, more than 21 million voting-age Americans do not have ready access to a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers. Millions more possess citizenship documents whose names may not match their current legal names. Married women who changed their surnames are one obvious example.Even otherwise, the legislation has become much more than a debate about an ID card; It is also a debate about who should run American elections. And this where Trump’s India analogy gets interesting.India has a centralized Election Commission of India which administers national parliamentary and state-assembly elections with standardized procedures and voter identification. America deliberately went in the opposite direction. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of concentrating political power in the federal government, so the US Constitution left substantial responsibility for conducting elections with the states, while giving Congress power to regulate federal elections.So while Congress has enacted national election laws, including voter-registration and election-administration requirements, the day-to-day machinery remains overwhelmingly decentralized. Thus America ended up with thousands of election jurisdictions, varying registration procedures, differing ID requirements, different early- and mail-voting rules.And this constitutional architecture was designed when there were 13 states, not 50, and when the word “instantaneous” would have been considered an ambitious description of horse drawn carriages which plowed through snow in winter to ferry ballot boxes and officials (which is why US elections takes place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, but a new President takes oath almost ten weeks later on January 20 after a laborious process).The US system has plenty of weaknesses: registration errors, voter-roll disputes, gerrymandering, unequal procedures, campaign-finance problems, partisan election administration and endless arguments over mail ballots and voting machines. India’s system isn’t perfect either. Its elections face controversies over money and political influence, voter rolls, and persistent disputes over electronic voting machines.So while neither country has perfect elections, Trump appears to have concluded that America’s complicated old electoral jalopy needs an Indian owner’s manual, which itself is far from perfect.