The Republican-controlled US House is set to pass a new version of the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter restriction bill that would require people to show citizenship documents to register to vote and strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.
The House consideration of the new bill, now called the SAVE America Act, comes roughly a week after President Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” While the latest iteration of the SAVE Act does not usurp state and local election administration in precisely that way, it would still massively federalize new restrictions on voting that Trump and his allies have pushed for years.
“This would undoubtedly sow massive chaos in our elections. It would radically alter the way all Americans cast their ballots as elections are already underway. It would completely upend the 2026 election cycle.”
The centerpiece of the bill remains a requirement that voters show proof of US citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups.
That likely understates the number of Americans who could be burdened by the bill, since most people do not carry around citizenship documents with them. Half of Americans, roughly 146 million people, do not have a passport. And 69 million women who took their partner’s last name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill.
“If the SAVE Act were to pass, it would be the worst voter suppression law that Congress has ever enacted, certainly in recent memory,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
The bill, which still faces steep odds in the Senate, would go into effect immediately after passage by Congress. That could completely disrupt the midterms and increase the likelihood of widespread voter disenfranchisement. “This would undoubtedly sow massive chaos in our elections,” says Gréta Bedekovics, director of democracy at the Center for American Progress (CAP). “It would radically alter the way all Americans cast their ballots as elections are already underway. It would completely upend the 2026 election cycle.”
The bill goes much further than simply requiring citizenship papers to vote, as I reported when it first passed the House in April 2025:
It would upend voter registration in the US because of a requirement that voters provide this documentation in person at an election office. According to voting rights experts, that requirement would end online registration, mail registration, and voter registration drives, methods that accounted for 1 in 3 registrations during the 2018–2022 election cycles. This requirement would apply not just for new registrants, but every time someone updates their registration. Roughly 80 million people register or re-register every election cycle, and less than 6 percent registered at an election office.
Although touted by Republicans, this provision of the bill could most harm some GOP-leaning constituencies. A CAP study of the 30 largest counties in the US by area, which represent eight Western states, found that voters “would be forced to drive, on average across the counties, four-and-a-half hours round trip and cover approximately 260 miles to reach their election office.” Some voters might have to drive as far as eight hours to register to vote.
On top of the proof of citizenship measure, Republicans added a photo ID requirement to vote. This was likely for messaging purposes, so that they can trot out the usual talking points about how you need ID to buy liquor, get on a plane, etc. But voting, unlike flying or drinking, is a constitutionally protected right, and 21 million Americans also do not have a current driver’s license and could be disenfranchised by this provision as well. Moreover, the United States, unlike other countries that require a photo ID to vote, does not issue a national ID card, and the provision would be stricter than any voter ID law at the state level except for in Ohio. Student IDs, for example, would not be accepted for voting purposes, nor would many tribal IDs. And the bill would require a photocopy of someone’s photo ID with a mail-in ballot, which would disrupt mail voting in most states.
“This bill is more than a voter ID bill,” says Sweren-Becker. “This bill is a show your papers policy. That is very different from any kind of voter ID policy that states have imposed across the country. There are states that require voter ID in a variety of forms. What the SAVE Act would do, which is to require something like a birth certificate or passport upon registration, is significantly more restrictive and would block millions of Americans from voting nationally.”
The other major change to the bill would require states to hand over their voter rolls, which includes sensitive personal information, to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS would then cross-check state rolls with its own citizenship verification tool, also known as the SAVE program, creating “a federalized surveillance system of voters under Kristi Noem,” Bedekovics says. “After what’s happened in Minnesota, Americans don’t want Noem in charge of anything, let alone their voter registration status.”
“This bill is more than a voter ID bill. This bill is a show your papers policy.”
The DHS database has a history of incorrectly flagging eligible voters, particularly naturalized citizens, as non-citizens based on faulty data, which could lead them to being wrongly purged from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sued 24 states to get access to state voter data and has already lost in court in California, Oregon, and Michigan.
The new SAVE Act, like the old one that passed the House last year, remains predicated on the lie that non-citizens are systematically voting in US elections, which every major study has disproven. As I previously reported:
In reality, such instances are minuscule in number. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible noncitizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed 42 jurisdictions, home to 23 million people, including 8 of the 10 areas with the highest populations of noncitizens, and found just 30 instances of a suspected noncitizen voting, equal to 0.0001 percent of total votes.
The latest data reinforces that point. Utah recently reviewed the eligibility of the 2.1 million voters on its rolls and didn’t find a single case of a non-citizen voting.
But we do have tangible examples of how such measures burden eligible voters:
When Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 new registrants, more than 31,000 people, from registering. Nearly half were under 30. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who saw the law as a model for the nation, claimed noncitizen voting was “pervasive” but identified only seven convictions for such acts in Kansas over a 13-year period. A federal court struck down the law in 2018; the alleged cases of voter fraud Kobach presented before the court, which he called “the tip of the iceberg,” was “only an icicle,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Kobach’s replacement, Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab, told the Associated Press. “It didn’t work out so well.”
Along with the SAVE America Act, Republicans are pushing an even more extreme bill in the House, the Make Elections Great Again Act (MEGA), that would mandate frequent purging of the voter rolls, ban universal mail-in voting, and allow the attorney general to file criminal charges against election officials. The bill received a hearing in the House on Tuesday.
Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk, continue to exert a tremendous amount of pressure on Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, even though Republicans strenuously defended the chamber’s 60-vote requirement and railed against federal encroachment on states’ rights when Democrats tried to pass federal voting rights legislation during the Biden administration. “There aren’t anywhere close to the votes, not even close, to nuking the filibuster,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-N.D.) admitted on Tuesday.
“When Democrats attempted to advance sweeping election reform legislation in 2021, Republicans were unanimous in opposition because it would have federalized elections, something we have long opposed,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on Tuesday, announcing her opposition to the new bills. “Now, I’m seeing proposals such as the SAVE Act and MEGA that would effectively do just that. Once again, I do not support these efforts.”
It’s no coincidence that Republicans are aggressively promoting a new attempt to dramatically nationalize restrictions on voting at the same time that the Trump administration is undertaking unprecedented attempts to interfere in the midterms, from seizing 700 boxes of ballots and election records in Fulton County, Georgia, to demanding that Minnesota hand over its voter rolls as a condition of ICE leaving the state.
“The Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign to interfere with the midterm elections now for over a year, and more recently, the president has essentially said the quiet part out loud,” says Sweren-Becker. “But this has been a long running effort to undermine election administration, undermine trust in elections, interfere with the voter rolls, interfere with election officials doing their job. The SAVE Act is one part of this attempt to sow mistrust in elections, discourage Americans from participating, and outright stop millions of Americans from participating.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.