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Excerpts from America's paper of record:

1) Its stated aim is to crack down on voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare.

Fraudulent voting by noncitizens is already illegal and extremely rare, and there is no evidence to support Mr. Trump’s charges that Democrats have tried to mobilize undocumented immigrants to sway elections in their favor.

Democrats who oppose the legislation argue that it would suppress and discourage legal voting — particularly among groups that typically support Democrats, such as naturalized citizens, people of color and lower-income people. The measure, they say, places an undue burden on eligible voters who may lack the necessary documentation to comply with the new identification requirements.

They also fear that Mr. Trump and Republicans are using the debate to sow uncertainty and distrust about the midterm elections to lay the groundwork for claiming widespread fraud should they lose, as appears increasingly likely.

But Republicans say no reasonable lawmaker should oppose taking basic steps to ensure that only citizens can vote.

2) It would stiffen voter identification requirements nationwide.

Existing law bars noncitizens from voting in elections and requires those registering to vote to prove their eligibility by presenting a driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number. If registrants have neither, states are authorized to verify their eligibility another way, such as by using a federal database to verify their citizenship status. For mail-in ballots, most states verify voters’ identities by comparing their signature with the one on file from registration, or by requiring voters to include the signature of a witness.

The legislation would significantly tighten those requirements. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote. That would limit mail or online registration, and direct voters to local election offices instead. There, they would have to produce documentary proof of U.S. citizenship such as a REAL ID — a form of state identification compliant with federal regulations — that indicates American citizenship, birth certificate, passport or military identification card.

The bill would also mandate that all voters present a government-issued photo ID at polling places. Those seeking to vote by mail would have to enclose a copy of photo identification both when requesting a ballot and when returning it.

States would be required to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, to be cross-referenced with citizenship data and purged of those deemed ineligible to vote. And election workers who fail to properly verify an applicant’s eligibility to vote could face criminal penalties.

It would take effect this year, requiring states and local governments to institute the changes before midterm elections in which voting is already well underway.

3) Many eligible voters would not meet the requirements.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according to a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

Citing those limitations, Democrats and election experts say that many voters would be disenfranchised by the measure. They have also raised concerns that women who change their name upon marriage and lack documents reflecting their current surnames could find it more difficult to register to vote.

In Kansas, which enacted a statewide law in 2011 requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration, the verification process rejected roughly 31,000 eligible voters, or about 12 percent of all applicants. A federal judge struck down the law in 2018.

4) States have raised concerns about their ability to comply with the measure.

The bill would mandate that states comply with new requirements within days of enactment without providing any extra funding for them. For instance, many local election offices are currently unequipped to verify citizenship status.

David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said the new requirements would put a severe burden on underfunded local election offices to quickly devise and adopt a new verification system.

“It’s almost as if the authors of this bill invite chaos into our election process,” Mr. Becker said.

Critics also warn that many states lack the procedures or materials to properly collect copies of photo identification to accompany mail-in ballots or requests for them, which would effectively leave them with no legal way to allow mail-in voting should the legislation become law.

Mr. Trump has made clear he would like to do away with the practice and urged Republicans to include such a provision in the bill.

In a conference call over the weekend with voting rights advocates and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, the lawyer Marc Elias said the requirement “is masquerading as photo ID” but “is really just a ban on mail-in voting.”

5) The bill comes as Trump continues to groundlessly cast doubt on elections.

Mr. Trump and right-wing activists have escalated their efforts to force through the bill as the president continues to falsely claim voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Last month, Mr. Trump called for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States, after the F.B.I. moved to seize ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga.

The search warrant for the center showed that the criminal investigation was started by a leading election denier in the Trump administration, Kurt Olsen. He played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including speaking to the president many times on Jan. 6, 2021.

Those opposed to the bill have warned that requiring states to turn over their voter rolls could hand the Trump administration data it could distort to claim widespread fraud, by pointing to what could be benign irregularities such as duplicate registration of a voter who moved to a different state or inconsistencies brought about by name changes.