The story so far:

President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had asked his administration how elections are held in the U.S. without a valid photo identity card.

He also pointed out that just 1% of India’s 64.64 crore electors who voted in the last general elections voted by mail (unlike the large number who do so in the U.S.) Mr. Trump reiterated his demand that Congress pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and a photo ID to cast a ballot, among other restrictions.

How are elections conducted in the U.S. and how do they differ from elections in India?

Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution (the Elections Clause) empowers the State legislatures to determine the “times, places, and manner” of federal elections, even as it allows Congress to alter or make such regulations. There is no national election authority like the Election Commission of India. There is the Federal Election Commission, but it is only empowered to regulate campaign finance as registration, balloting, and counting are done by the States’ county and municipal jurisdictions. This is due to the strongly federal nature of the U.S., unlike India’s quasi-federal system. 

The U.S. Congress also passed the National Voter Registration Act, 1993, which required States to offer voter registration at motor vehicle and public assistance offices, and the Help America Vote Act, 2002, which provided funding for States to buy new voting machines and called for State-wide elector databases. 

Voter eligibility in the U.S. is therefore a State concern, and registration is elector-initiated. While documentary proof of citizenship is not demanded, a potential elector has to affirm citizenship under penalty of perjury on the registration form. Thirty-six States ask for some form of identification at the polling place and 23 ask for a photo ID. 

This is unlike India, where electoral rolls are compiled in each State via house-to-house enumeration conducted by the ECI, which has superintendence over the whole process of registration. Eligible electors are then issued the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC), though other documents, including Aadhaar, can be used as identification at the booth as well. 

Is non-citizen voting a real problem in the U.S. as Trump has made it out to be?

Independent studies have found that almost all non-citizen registrations in the U.S. are accidental and only a small proportion of them votes. The Trump administration’s claims have not survived scrutiny. The New York Times reported that after announcing in July that it had identified 2,78,000 non-citizens on the rolls of four States, including 15,903 in Nevada, the Department of Homeland Security told Nevada’s election administrators this month that it had identified just 185 potential non-citizens so far. It described the earlier figure as a “ceiling” and shared a list without names. 

Surveys show that a large majority of the electorate supports the requirement of photo identification at the polls. Yet, even this is short of the more onerous requirement of proving citizenship at the point of registration, which is what the SAVE America Act requires. 

What is the SAVE America Act, and why is it opposed by Democrats and others?

The SAVE America Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in February along party lines, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats. It requires every new registering elector or an existing elector who wants to update his/her record to produce a passport, or a birth certificate, or naturalisation papers along with a government photo ID. Mail-in voters — a widely used option in the U.S. — have to enclose a copy of their photo ID. States will then run names on electoral rolls through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the latter could flag non-citizens for removal. Election officials who register people who lack the documents can face up to five years in prison. 

The Bipartisan Policy Centre in the U.S. estimates that over 20 million eligible American citizens do not have ready access to a passport or a birth certificate. Newly registering young adults have also faced problems producing these documents. These concerns have led the Democratic Party to oppose the SAVE America Act, which has stalled in the Senate.

Is India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process delivering the “pure” rolls that the ECI promises?

The SIR, launched by the ECI to “purify” the electoral rolls, uses a peculiar methodology in which electors must self-enumerate on forms distributed door-to-door by the ECI before being included in the draft roll. After scrutiny by election officials, who will compare the forms with the previous SIR conducted more than two decades ago in the States, the draft rolls will be updated (the corrections and clarifications phase) before new SIR rolls are released. 

The three phases of the SIR conducted by the ECI have been beset by anomalies in each State. By phase 2 of the SIR, for instance, more than 7 crore names were deleted during the process. The issues with the SIR are reflected in the drastic fall in gender ratio in the new rolls across most States. In West Bengal, in particular, an analysis published in The Hindu showed that there has been a religious skew in the deletions as well, which mattered in the way the election results panned out in the State. Despite these infirmities and anomalies, the Supreme Court held that the exercise was well within the ECI’s statutory mandate. 

The SIR in India has shifted the onus of verifying voter eligibility onto electors, unlike the earlier process in which election officials prepared the rolls by identifying and enrolling eligible citizens through house-to-house surveys. Opponents of the SAVE America Act have raised a similar concern about the Trump administration-backed legislation. 

Published – August 23, 2026 01:00 am IST

Nigerians are facing one of the West African nation’s worst economic crises in years triggered by surging inflation, the result of monetary policies that have pushed the currency to an all-time low against the dollar. The situation has provoked anger and protests across the country.

The latest government statistics released Thursday showed the inflation rate in January rose to 29.9%, its highest since 1996, mainly driven by food and non-alcoholic beverages. Nigeria’s currency, the naira, further plummeted to 1,524 to $1 on Friday, reflecting a 230% loss of value in the last year.

“My family is now living one day at a time (and) trusting God,” said trader Idris Ahmed, whose sales at a clothing store in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja have declined from an average of $46 daily to $16.

The plummeting currency worsens an already bad situation, further eroding incomes and savings. It squeezes millions of Nigerians already struggling with hardship due to government reforms including the removal of gas subsidies that resulted in gas prices tripling.

Nigeria’s economy

With a population of more than 210 million people, Nigeria is not just Africa’s most populous country but also the continent’s largest economy. Its gross domestic product is driven mainly by services such as information technology and banking, followed by manufacturing and processing businesses and then agriculture.

The challenge is that the economy is far from sufficient for Nigeria’s booming population, relying heavily on imports to meet the daily needs of its citizens from cars to cutlery. So it is easily affected by external shocks such as the parallel foreign exchange market that determines the price of goods and services.

Nigeria’s economy is heavily dependent on crude oil, its largest foreign exchange earner. When crude prices plunged in 2014, authorities used its scarce foreign reserves to try to stabilise the naira amid multiple exchange rates. The government also shut down the land borders to encourage local production and limited access to the dollar for importers of certain items.

The measures, however, further destabilised the naira by facilitating a booming parallel market for the dollar. Crude oil sales that boost foreign exchange earnings have also dropped because of chronic theft and pipeline vandalism.

Monetary reforms implementation

Shortly after taking the reins of power in May last year, President Bola Tinubu took bold steps to fix the ailing economy and attract investors. He announced the end of costly decadeslong gas subsidies, which the government said were no longer sustainable. Meanwhile, the country’s multiple exchange rates were unified to allow market forces to determine the rate of the local naira against the dollar, which in effect devalued the currency.

Analysts say there were no adequate measures to contain the shocks that were bound to come as a result of reforms including the provision of a subsidized transportation system and an immediate increase in wages.

So the more than 200% increase in gas prices caused by the end of the gas subsidy started to have a knock-on effect on everything else, especially because locals rely heavily on gas-powered generators to light their households and run their businesses.

Why naira is plummeting

Under the previous leadership of the Central Bank of Nigeria, policymakers tightly controlled the rate of the naira against the dollar, thereby forcing individuals and businesses in need of dollars to head to the black market, where the currency was trading at a much lower rate.

There was also a huge backlog of accumulated foreign exchange demand on the official market — estimated to be $7 billion — due in part to limited dollar flows as foreign investments into Nigeria and the country’s sale of crude oil have declined.

Authorities said a unified exchange rate would mean easier access to the dollar, thereby encouraging foreign investors and stabilising the naira. But that has yet to happen because inflows have been poor. Instead, the naira has further weakened as it continues to depreciate against the dollar.

What authorities are doing

CBN Gov Olayemi Cardoso has said the bank has cleared $2.5 billion of the foreign exchange backlog out of the $7 billion that had been outstanding. The bank, however, found that $2.4 billion of that backlog were false claims that it would not clear, Cardoso said, leaving a balance of about $2.2 billion, which he said will be cleared “soon.”

Tinubu, meanwhile, has directed the release of food items such as cereals from government reserves among other palliatives to help cushion the effect of the hardship. The government has also said it plans to set up a commodity board to help regulate the soaring prices of goods and services.

On Thursday, the Nigerian leader met with state governors to deliberate on the economic crisis, part of which he blamed on the large-scale hoarding of food in some warehouses.

“We must ensure that speculators, hoarders and rent seekers are not allowed to sabotage our efforts in ensuring the wide availability of food to all Nigerians,” Tinubu said.

By Friday morning, local media were reporting that stores were being sealed for hoarding and charging unfair prices.

How Nigerians are coping

The situation is at its worst in conflict zones in northern Nigeria, where farming communities are no longer able to cultivate what they eat as they are forced to flee violence. Pockets of protests have broken out in past weeks but security forces have been quick to impede them, even making arrests in some cases.

In the economic hub of Lagos and other major cities, there are fewer cars and more legs on the roads as commuters are forced to trek to work. The prices of everything from food to household items increase daily.

“Even to eat now is a problem,” said Ahmed in Abuja. “But what can we do?”