The myth that noncitizens are voting in large numbers in US elections wasn’t quashed with Donald Trump’s victory last year. Instead, a Republican bill that would make voting more difficult for millions of eligible US voters based on this false premise is expected to come up for a vote in the coming weeks.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act, or Save act, is aimed at eliminating rare instances of noncitizens voting in US elections. It could disenfranchise swaths of eligible voters – including people who changed their names in marriage, young voters, naturalized citizens and tribal residents – by requiring onerous identification to vote.
The bill comes after the US president signed an executive order on 25 March calling for requiring documentary proof of citizenship to be added to federal voter registration forms. If states don’t comply, they face federal funding cuts. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, called the order “the farthest-reaching executive action taken” in the country’s history. Lawsuits are expected – several states have said the order is an unconstitutional federal overreach.
The Save act creates similar hurdles to the voting process. It will make voter registration more difficult by upending online and mail registration, a particular burden on rural voters. States would be required to purge their voter rolls based on incomplete data and potentially start the deportation process for people who unlawfully registered to vote.
It also installs criminal penalties for elections officials who register people without the required documentation, even if the person turns out to be a citizen eligible to vote, and includes a private right of action that would allow anyone to file claims against election officials. This puts election workers in a “really precarious position”, said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project.
Voting rights groups have sounded the alarm on the bill since it was introduced in 2024, when Trump boosted its profile and recommended its passage based on the myth that noncitizens were voting en masse and “stealing” elections from him and other Republicans. (There is no evidence that noncitizens are voting, or even registered to vote, in any meaningful numbers.)
The Save act was introduced by the Republican Chip Roy last year and again this year. It was passed by the House last year, but it didn’t get anywhere in the Senate. The House is expected to take it up again soon.
Elections officials from both parties have said the bill would be difficult for their offices to implement, cost them money that the bill doesn’t provide, and may not actually work.
Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections, told the Associated Press that the criminal penalties were a concern, saying the government shouldn’t be “throwing election workers or secretaries of state or county clerks in jail for accidentally registering a noncitizen to vote when we don’t have adequate tools to even verify citizenship”.
The bill has created a host of questions and confusion. For example, while the bill says Real IDs could be used if they indicate whether the applicant is a US citizen, these IDs ordinarily do not include that information, and lawful residents who are not citizens and ineligible to vote can still get Real IDs.
“I think it’s likely that if enacted into law, there would be extensive uncertainty and litigation about what exactly is required and what election officials need to do,” said Rachel Orey, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s elections project.
About half of US citizens do not have a passport, eliminating one of the main ways to show their ability to vote. Others no longer have their birth certificates. Research from the Brennan Center, VoteRiders and other groups in 2024 found that more than 9% of voting-age citizens, about 21 million people, don’t have readily available proof of citizenship.
People of color are more likely to lack these documents than white people, the study found. There are disproportionate impacts on young voters, rural residents, tribal citizens, people who are unhoused or low-income, people born in US territories and those who have experienced natural disasters.
Infographics and social media posts have circulated claiming as many as 69 million American women could be unable to vote because they changed their names after getting married, meaning their birth certificates do not match their current identification. While changing your name in marriage alone will not disqualify you from voting, some who don’t update documents such as their passport could face barriers in registering to vote and need to show additional proof.
Changing documents or getting replacements costs money and takes time. And some won’t realize they need to present new documents until an election is nearing, then run out of time.
Beyond the Save act, states are adding similar identification requirements for voters. Documentary proof of citizenship laws have recently passed in some states, including New Hampshire and Louisiana, and been proposed in at least 19 other states, according to VoteRiders.
Arizona has a bifurcated registration system that requires proof of citizenship for state and local elections, but couldn’t require it for federal elections. Those who ended up on the federal-only list, meaning they didn’t provide proof of citizenship, were not noncitizens – they were concentrated near college campuses or a large homeless shelter, a Votebeat analysis found.
Naturalized citizens were caught up in efforts to purge voter rolls of potential noncitizens in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Some received notices from their state’s elections officials saying they could be criminally charged if they voted, they previously told the Guardian.
Kansas required documentary proof of citizenship in a state law, which the ACLU successfully sued over. In that lawsuit, the organization demonstrated how the law was affecting new registrants, often young voters or naturalized citizens.
“We had a plaintiff in our Kansas case who lost her documentation and really saw the cost to replace this documentation as a choice between the ability to pay her rent or be able to vote,” Lakin said.
Tad Stricker moved back to Kansas and registered to vote when he got his driver’s license. When he went to vote in 2014, he was given a provisional ballot; he was not told when he registered that he had needed to prove his citizenship under the new law.
Stricker heard a story on NPR about others who had been disenfranchised by the law, then received a call from the ACLU. He become a plaintiff in the organization’s lawsuit, which he found “extremely stressful”.
He was made to do his deposition for the case during the week his wife returned to work after parental leave, so had to bring his newborn son, taking breaks for diapers and bottles. The former secretary of state Kris Kobach, the architect of the law, wouldn’t agree to change the deposition date, Stricker said. “In my mind, it was a tactic to try to force me out of the case or to miss the deposition,” he said.
He said having to vote provisionally was “embarrassing”, only for his vote to not actually count in the end. A federal court reinstated voting rights for him and others after the ACLU won the case.
“Ironically, I had all of the documentation that was needed on me, if they’d simply asked when I registered to vote, and so it shows how people can be inadvertently impacted while being directly impacted at the same time,” he said.
