How the Save America Act could make big changes to voting

Ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans are again pushing for legislation that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to vote.

The Trump-backed American Voter Eligibility Protection Act, or Save America Act, seeks to meet the president’s longstanding demands to “fix” US elections that he says are “rigged” and “stolen,” despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

“American citizens, and only American citizens, should decide American elections,” the White House posted on X in support of the Save America Act, repeating a talking point Trump has relied on for years.

Voting for non-citizens is extremely rare. It has been illegal in US federal elections for more than a century, and is a crime that can result in fines, imprisonment and deportation. Despite this, Republicans see non-citizen voting as a major concern.

The bill is scheduled to be voted on in the House of Representatives this week, said Rep. Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, who called it “common sense legislation.” But the legislation’s path is uncertain in the Senate, where previous iterations of the measure have stalled. The Senate is considering its own bill on noncitizen voting.

Voting rights groups say the Save America Act would disenfranchise millions of Americans if it passes.

The president has intensified his electoral demands in recent weeks. Trump, who has long questioned the electoral process, called on the federal government to “nationalize” the election last week, a position he later repeated. The president’s position has raised concerns among election officials and is in direct conflict with the US Constitution, which stipulates that elections are administered by the states.

Here’s a brief guide to the election-related bills that are in the spotlight in Congress right now.

What does the Save America Act do?

A woman holds a voting booth at an East Harlem school turned polling station on Election Day in Manhattan, New York, in 2024. Photograph by Kent J. Edwards/Reuters

The Save America Act is an expanded version of legislation that the House has passed twice in as many years. It failed to vacate the Senate in both cases.

Each version of the Conservation Act had a common throughline: Requiring Americans to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. For most people, this likely means a passport or birth certificate.

While the bill lists other qualifying documents that could prove citizenship, they may not meet the requirements of the measure, said Sean Morales Doyle, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

One such document is an identification card that complies with the provisions of the Real ID Act of 2005 and “indicates that the applicant is a U.S. citizen.”

Real ID cards are available to citizens and non-citizens alike, Morales-Doyle said.

There is no single state REAL ID card that clearly indicates citizenship status, and neither do most state-issued driver’s licenses.

The law also requires a government-issued photo ID to vote in person, and a copy of an eligible photo ID when requesting and submitting an absentee ballot.

There are other provisions in this latest version of the SAVE Act, such as requiring mail-in applicants to provide proof of citizenship in person and requiring states to take steps to ensure only U.S. citizens are registered to vote.

The bill would also add criminal penalties for any election official who registers an applicant who fails to provide documentary proof of citizenship. These penalties apply even if the individual is a U.S. citizen, said Rachel Urey, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

They said this is one of the “most troubling gray areas” in the Save America Act because it gives “vague discretion” to an election official who could face criminal punishment.

This, they said, “risks creating an environment in which election officials are almost overly committed, with an overly over-interpreting of the law, which may mean that this process that is intended to be fail-safe actually does not work like one because election officials do not have the protections they might need to make that decision on a case-by-case basis.”

The second bill, called the Make Elections Great Again Act, would require citizenship documentation to register to vote, along with photo ID provisions. But it also adds a host of other election changes, such as a blanket ban on mail-in voting.

All of the bills under consideration are “unfunded mandates” and need time and resources to implement, Urey said. A one-year waiting period is the “optimal” length of time for states to implement a new policy or measure, according to recommendations issued by the Bipartisan Policy Center after the 2020 election.

Given the scope of the changes proposed by the Save America Act and other bills, Ory said a longer lead time would be warranted.

“We do not recommend that states or the federal government implement election administration policy changes in a federal election year, let alone a policy change that would be this significant,” they said.

What voters think

A voting sign is photographed during the 2024 US Presidential Election on Election Day in Milwaukee. Photography by Vincent Alban – Reuters

Republicans, including Roy, say polls indicate broad support for their reforms, “no matter your background.”

Michael J. said: Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, said there is strong support for voter ID, which applies when someone casts a ballot.

“As you might expect, Republicans tend to have stronger support, but Democratic majorities in most polls support that as well,” he said.

Voters broadly support requiring a photo ID to vote, which is already in place in 36 states. According to a Pew Research poll in August, 83% of US adults felt that way, including 71% of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters and 95% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters. 58% of American adults supported voting by mail for any reason, an idea supported by far more Democrats (83%) than Republicans (32%).

Voter ID “has broad support because a large majority of people have these documents and are willing to have them, and they’re completely unaware that large portions of the public don’t have them, or they’re hard to get, or the information is expired,” Hanmer said.

In a separate Gallup poll conducted in October 2024, 83% of voters said they supported requiring people who register to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.

The White House released an online statement on Tuesday, compiling many of these numbers, and more.

Who will be most affected if the Save America Act is passed?

Nine percent of American citizens — or 21.3 million people — do not have ready access to proof of citizenship, the Brennan Center for Justice found in a 2023 national poll.

“These are not documents that people walk around with,” Morales-Doyle said.

He added that only about half of Americans have a passport.

“This makes Americans have to prove that they are Americans,” Morales-Doyle added. In order to exercise their basic constitutional rights, they must present their papers.”

More than 3.8 million adult U.S. citizens lack any form of citizenship documentation, such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers, according to UMD’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.

• This is a critical issue among people of color. Three percent said they had no documents at all, compared to 1 percent of white citizens.
• 11% of people of color, or about 8.4 million people, do not have easy access to citizenship documents compared to 8% of white Americans.
• This issue also addresses political affiliation. Independents were more likely than Democrats and Republicans to lack or not have easy access to citizenship documents.
• Young people, between the ages of 18 and 24, are also less likely to access these services. The center’s analysis indicated that many young people may not know where their birth certificate is stored or it may be in another place, another state, or with their parents or other family members.

“We have a very mobile community,” said Hanmer, the center’s director. “A lot of people, when they move to another state, are fascinated by the changes and differences that come up” to re-register and vote.

There’s another hurdle: Birth certificates may not be up to date.

For millions of married women who took their husband’s name, birth certificates may not match the legal names they now use. This was a concern when the SAVE Act was introduced before, and it angered voters last year who confronted their representatives — Republicans and Democrats — over their support of the measure.

Zooming out, there is already a citizenship verification process when registering to vote, Hanmer said. This process, “which is actually 51 separate systems,” is done differently depending on the state because that’s how our system is built, he added.

Hanmer pointed to state audits, some of which are led by Republicans, that have found few instances of noncitizens casting ballots.

Ahead of the 2024 general election, Georgia announced that a review of voter rolls found that 20 people registered to vote in the state were not U.S. citizens, and Michigan found that 16 noncitizens cast ballots in the 2024 general election — both amounting to fractions of a percentage point when considering the millions registered to vote in each state.

“Our elections are complex, and there are a lot of challenges for people to keep up with,” Hanmer said, noting that people may not be aware of election changes or feel confused about their state’s current voter ID requirements or voter registration rules.

What helps is having the right information, which also requires “the discipline of government officials to try to do the same or at least not make the matter worse by making accusations for which they have no evidence, or worse, that they know are untrue.”

What other countries have tried proving citizenship?

Although efforts to approve the SAVE Act have so far stalled at the federal level, state lawmakers have pushed since the mid-2000s for bills that include similarly restrictive citizenship requirements.

Arizona has had a proof of citizenship requirement on the books since 2004. A new law in 2022, which expanded on the original measure, was challenged in court and later made its way to the Supreme Court. The justices allowed Arizona to partially reinstate its law, creating a gerrymandered voting system in which tens of thousands of voters who did not submit a citizenship document could vote in federal elections, but were barred from casting ballots in state and local races.

In 2018, a federal judge invalidated a Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Evidence in that case showed that Kansas suspended or canceled more than 30,000 applications to vote that lacked documentary proof of citizenship. A district court found that canceled or pending applications accounted for about 12% of new voter registration applications filed after the law was implemented in 2011.

“As with anything in the politics of election administration, the devil is in the details,” Ory said. “We need to be very careful about how we implement citizenship verification so that we do not inadvertently create new barriers to eligible citizens.”

New Hampshire is one of the most recent states to impose documentation requirements, passing its law in 2024. It is one of six states not indebted to the NVRA. A report later released by the New Hampshire Voting Rights Campaign found that more than 240 people were disqualified last year — a non-presidential election year — after the law took effect.

All of these examples “kind of illustrate the reality that we expect when we say the FRA could prevent millions of Americans from voting,” Morales-Doyle said.