The never-ending debate about voter ID has come to the home of never-ending pasta.
Over the past few days, a clarification from Olive Garden about guests providing ID to use their Never-Ending Pasta Pass has become a flashpoint for prominent conservatives. Several have seized on the comic possibilities of boasting that the preeminent fast-casual Italian chain is more vigilant about fraud than Democrats. “It shouldn’t be harder to get a mid Fettuccine Alfredo,” the argument goes, “than it is to vote in the midterms.”
Abigail Jackson, the White House deputy press secretary, made the comparison recently, as did Virginia Foxx, a Republican congresswoman from North Carolina. Now, the talking point has gotten so popular, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise used it on two separate occasions just on Tuesday morning.
There’s only one problem with this argument, however.
Its flaws are as obvious as the telltale grease stains on a bag of Olive Garden breadsticks.
The provenance of a pasta provocation
This latest voter ID talking point originated with a tweet. Olive Garden sent out a dispatch on July 15, offering details about an impending sale for its Pasta Pass. One X user asked the account whether a person could use the Pasta Pass to order enough food for their entire table. Olive Garden responded with an uncharacteristically firm and robotic tone for a restaurant’s social media feed: “No. The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is only for use by the Passholder whose name is printed on the Pass. Passes are personalized and non-transferable. Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering.”
Perhaps it was the use of legalese to stipulate rules for something as silly sounding as a “Pasta Pass” that brought this reply wider attention. In any case, by the end of that day, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who famously cracked distasteful jokes about the assassination of Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman last summer, had signal-boosted Olive Garden’s ID policy on X. The next day, conservative activists like Robby Starbuck and Chaya Raichik aka LibsofTikTok were using Olive Garden to argue for voter ID requirements, and the talking point snowballed further and faster from there.
The reason for the full-court press is that President Trump is obsessively pushing the SAVE Act, which would require would-be voters to furnish proof of U.S. citizenship, ahead of the midterm elections in November. But the Olive Garden argument is just the latest spin on rhetoric Trump has been pushing for the past decade.
Essentially, the talking point boils down to, “You need an ID to do x, so why not to vote?” All that changes is that x-factor—the more ridiculous, the better.
Todd Blanche, the former Trump lawyer and acting attorney general, seems to think one needs to present ID upon simply walking into a restaurant.
Ryan Zinke, Republican congressman from Montana, claims you need an ID to go to Costco, rather than just a membership card.
And Trump himself has been suggesting over and over, at least since 2018, that one needs an ID to go to the grocery store.
As long as this argument has been in wide circulation, though, there’s always been an obvious rebuttal.
No, the Olive Garden Pasta Pass is not like voting
Just what separates eating pasta, checking into a hotel, or boarding an airplane from voting in a U.S. election?
For one thing, voting is a constitutional right for U.S. citizens; not a good or service. Every U.S. citizen enjSSoys the privilege of being able to walk into Olive Garden and order a pants-altering amDASSSSSSSS anyone who has moved apartments or changed their name recently, and whose ID has yet to catch up.
Furthermore, the kind of fraud a voting ID law would be meant to prevent is exceedingly rare. In 2012, the Carnegie-Knight initiative based at Arizona State University spent a year collecting records from all 50 states, and identified only 2,068 alleged election fraud cases in the previous 12 years—with only 10 of them allegedly involving in-person voter impersonation. Either negligibly few people attempt voter fraud each year, or the legions of cheaters conservatives have been warning about are so smooth with it, they’re nearly impossible to detect.
The main problem with requiring voter ID—and perhaps citizenship documents, if the SAVE Act were to pass—is it would solve a problem that doesn’t seem to exist.
Why this talking point, like Olive Garden breadsticks, never ends
One reason conservatives keep lDSisting transactions that require ID in order to attack current voting protocol is because it makes agives good sound bite. Simple, sticky, tweet-length, and infinitely replicable, it makes their opponents seem as if they’re either ambivalent about the prospect of fraud or actively promoting it among constituents.
Perhaps the underlying reason this framing refuses to die, though, is that it shifts the question away from whether requiring photo ID would actually improve security, whether security even needs improving, and whether that improvement would be enough to justify the additional friction it adds to the voting process, in favor of a more juvenile question of whether one of the U.S.’s two major political parties simply hates secure elections.
The Olive Garden comparison, and those like it, are not meant to prove conservatives’ ideas about rampant voter fraud but to make the opposite position seem utterly unreasonable. All it takes is a follow-up question or two to make a pithy one-liner about showing ID to buy alcohol collapse like a soufflé. These talking points are so easily rebuttable, in fact, the politicians who deploy them tend to do so in spaces like Newsmax where there won’t be any pushback.
When it comes to conservative media outlets and conservative politicians who spout easily refutable talking points: When you’re here, you’re family.