A persistent myth that millions of noncitizens are voting in federal elections is fueling legislation in Congress that could upend how Americans register to vote — and disenfranchise millions of people in the process.
House Republicans have reintroduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require a passport or a birth certificate matching one’s current legal name when registering to vote and sets onerous in-person requirements that would make it more difficult to participate in elections.
The House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 220-208 on April 10, with four Democratic members joining every Republican present in support. The bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear.
The SAVE Act, if passed into law, would “functionally eliminate” voter registration by mail and online voter registration, according to Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel at the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.
“It has a clear intent of trying to stop millions of American citizens from participating in our elections,” she told The Independent.
More than half of American citizens do not have a passport (application fees are $165) and 13 million citizens do not have ready access to citizenship documents, according to the Brennan Center. People of color are also more likely to lack easy access to those documents, the Brennan Center found. While roughly 8 percent of white American citizens don’t have citizenship documents readily available, that figure is nearly 11 percent among Americans of color.
Ilana Beller, democracy organizing manager with consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said the SAVE Act’s requirements will disproportionately impact women.
As many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name, according to the public policy think tank Center for American Progress.
“Once you change your name, the name on your birth certificate is no longer your legal name,” so changing one’s voter registration would essentially require a passport, Beller told reporters last month.
Updating documents or getting replacements can take a lot of time — and money. Voters will have to race to have them ready in time to meet voter registration deadlines.
“I am currently doing the things that conservatives so badly want women to do in this country: Get married, have kids, work a job,” she added. “ And because of that, Congress wants to force me to pay $165 and spend months jumping through hoops in order to participate in our democracy?”
Forcing in-person voter registration — including when updating voter registration — is “impractical and unfeasible for millions of Americans,” including people with disabilities, elderly Americans and Americans who live in rural areas, according to the Brennan Center’s Sweren-Becker.
House Republicans — with five Democrats — passed a version of SAVE Act in 2024, after House Speaker Mike Johnson joined Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago to tie the president’s anti-immigration agenda to “election integrity.” Elon Musk had even suggested that anyone who voted against the bill should be executed for treason. “Those who oppose this are traitors,” he wrote on X at the time. “What is the penalty for traitors again?”
Trump and his allies continue to baselessly insist that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, including amplifying false claims about voting machines and the ways in which elections work, like the safeguards in place to prevent ballots cast by noncitizens from manipulating the outcomes.
“This legislation is premised on, ultimately, lies about the outcome of the 2020 election, and misinformation and disinformation about the way our elections work, and conspiracy theories about who's participating in our elections,” Sweren-Becker said.
The president has separately signed an executive order that similarly requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote. It also would require a national mail-in ballot deadline of Election Day.
Trump’s order would also require the Election Assistance Commission to rewrite voting machine certification standards, and threatens to withhold federal funds to states that don’t use sufficiently compliant machines.
State voter rolls would also be shared with federal agencies.
White House staff secretary Will Scharf celebrated Trump’s order as “the farthest-reaching executive action taken” in the country’s history.
Election law professor Rick Hasen called it an “executive power grab” that could disenfranchise millions of voters. If the executive order survives legal challenges, it will “severely shift power over federal elections into the hands of the Presidency,” he wrote.
In their lawsuit trying to block the executive order, Democratic officials from 19 states argue that the president is illegally trying to usurp state control of elections. The order “sows confusion and sets the stage for chaos” in state election systems, attorneys general wrote in their lawsuit.
Handing registration information to agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency — which a federal judge has accused of launching a bogus “fishing expedition” for fraud — could also open the door for mass purges of voter rolls over spurious accusations of fraudulent voter registrations.
At least 19 states have proposed similar voter ID laws to target noncitizen voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, thousands of people across the country were targeted for removal from state voter databases for allegedly registering as a non-citizen, what civil rights groups said is part of a concerted mass disenfranchisement effort.
Most of those purges appeared to stem from errors on paperwork at a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles offices, which collect voter registration information.
And in state after state, eligible voters were accidentally caught up in those mass purges. Some were given notices that they would even be criminally charged if they tried to vote.
The SAVE Act and Trump’s order are “about MAGA Republicans wanting to choose their voters,” according to Susan Corke, executive director of bipartisan pro-democracy group State Democracy Defenders Action.
Republican lawmakers are “deliberately rigging the system to silence our voices and seize power for themselves” while Trump is “laying the groundwork for mass voter disenfranchisement,” she said in a statement.
The SAVE Act also would codify the surge in threats to state and local election workers by building in a specter of criminal prosecution or potentially crushing civil liability if officials challenge a voter’s eligibility.
Elections don’t stay free and fair without a fight.
“If there's any ambiguity as to whether somebody has adequately demonstrated citizenship, according to the bill, then election officials are going to be more inclined not to register that person because of reasonable fear of the consequences,” Sweren-Becker told The Independent.
The bill would direct states to come up with a process for people who do not have passports or requisite documents, but it’s not clear what those processes could entail, and whether states are even prepared to make those kinds of changes.
Within the two years before the 2020 election, more than 91 million Americans registered for the first time or updated their registrations — more than two-thirds of registered voters, according to the Brennan Center.
“I want folks to recognize that the fight for free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028 is on now,” the center’s vice president Wendy Weiser told reporters this week. “We need to be vigilant … Elections don’t stay free and fair without a fight.”
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