Sitting opposite moderator Kristen Welker on May 3, Blanche promoted the idea of requiring people to present their ID to vote, essentially pushing one part of the SAVE Act without referencing the legislation (which was passed by the House of Representatives but is stalled in the Senate as of this writing) by name.
President Donald Trump's administration has championed the legislation, which would generally require presenting documents displaying proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast one's vote at a polling place.
Blanche's verbatim statement, a response to a question from Welker about the future of free and fair elections in America, was this:
There's a lot of things we can be doing, like voter ID. Every time you walk into a restaurant or a club you have to show ID. How about you have to show your ID to vote? That's not anything that's crazy.
There's more than one aspect of Blanche's statement to explore, but we'll start with the wording of the statement itself and how social media users subtly changed it for partisan gain.
We know precisely what Blanche said because a brief video clip of his appearance on "Meet the Press" was attached to many of the posts that purported to accurately quote him. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the transcriptions offered by those posts omitted certain words. For example, this post on X: