To kick off the year, House Republicans reintroduced the SAVE Act, which would require every American to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register or re-register to vote. The bill passed the House last year but failed to advance in the Senate. Now that the GOP has a governing trifecta in Washington for the next two years, Republican members have fast-tracked the bill in the House and pledged to make it a top priority. Premised on conspiracy theories that have repeatedly been refuted, the SAVE Act could disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, undermine election administration, and harm election officials.
Disenfranchising eligible American citizens
The SAVE Act has been proposed even though federal and state law already state that only American citizens can vote in federal and state elections — and these laws carry harsh penalties. Additionally, the National Voter Registration Act already requires Americans trying to register to vote to confirm their U.S. citizenship status, and state law in the few states that are exempt from the National Voter Registration Act requires the same. In practice, the SAVE Act would require voters to prove their citizenship every time they register to vote, meaning that the millions of Americans who move each year — whether from state to state or to the next town over — could not register again without producing citizenship documents.
For most Americans, the SAVE Act would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate to register or re-register to vote. This could disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans. More than 21 million U.S. citizens of voting age don’t have proof of citizenship readily available. Less than half of American adults have a valid passport, and millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate.
Some Americans are far more likely than others to be disenfranchised. For example, older Americans are more likely to lack the kinds of documents required to vote under the SAVE Act. Two-thirds of Black Americans lack a valid U.S. passport, and passport ownership increases dramatically with income. Voters who change their names, including millions of married women, often lack proof of citizenship reflecting their current names. As seen in the two real-world examples below, in practice, younger voters can also be impacted, reflecting a disproportionate burden on both ends of the age distribution.
The harmful effects of proof-of-citizenship requirements have already been seen in states that have imposed them. When Arizona and Kansas implemented similar policies at the state level, tens of thousands of eligible citizens were blocked from registering. In Arizona, voters living on tribal land, voters on college campuses, and unhoused voters disproportionately lacked the requisite citizenship documents needed to register to vote in state elections. In Kansas, the burdens of the requirement fell most heavily on younger voters and the politically unaffiliated.
Not only did the Kansas and Arizona proof-of-citizenship laws block many Americans from voting, but they were impossible to administer effectively — for both Americans who sought to register and voters who’d been registered for decades. Federal courts struck down the Kansas requirement after it blocked 31,000 eligible citizens from registering to vote, with some unable to register even after producing citizenship documents. As election deniers have pressed to nationalize this requirement, Kansas’s Republican secretary of state (the state’s chief election official) has urged other states and the federal government not to follow that path, noting at the end of December that “Kansas did that 10 years ago. It didn’t work out so well.”
Arizona’s policy also created an administrative nightmare. In September, the state discovered that more than 200,000 voters who had registered before the proof-of-citizenship requirement was adopted (and therefore lacked citizenship data in their voter files) inadvertently had their citizenship status updated in the voter database without providing additional documentation. This computer glitch threw into question the eligibility of these longtime, lawful voters (predominantly Republicans and older Arizonans) to cast ballots in state races in the final weeks before the 2024 election. These voters were ultimately allowed to vote in state races during the 2024 cycle after a successful push by, among others, the Arizona Republican Party.
What’s more, the SAVE Act would upend mail-in and online registration options, two popular methods of voter registration. Likewise, it would stymie registration drives conducted by political parties and nonpartisan civic groups that add hundreds of thousands of citizens to the rolls every election.
Compelling problematic voter purges
The SAVE Act would compel voter roll purges that are bound to sweep in eligible American voters. Of course, in the extremely rare instance when a noncitizen does get registered (usually because of a misunderstanding or because they were misled about their eligibility), they should be removed from the rolls. But the SAVE Act would require voter purges without appropriate guardrails. For example, it would not require officials to notify registered voters before their removal, so Americans who are improperly purged might not find out until they show up to vote. Citizenship status can also change over time. In 2024, for example, some 800,000 people became naturalized U.S. citizens. That means the data used to initiate the purge process could be out of date, making the absence of notice to the registered voter especially problematic.
We know that overbroad purges of supposed noncitizens would ensnare eligible American voters because they already have. Examples abound from 2024 alone. Alabama attempted a purge of 3,251 people suspected of being noncitizens, but litigation revealed that the list included at least 2,000 eligible American voters. A federal district court stopped this faulty and unlawful purge.
Virginia’s purge of 1,600 people suspected of being noncitizens also included eligible citizens. Nevertheless, just six days before the November election, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted Virginia to proceed. The Washington Post reviewed Virginia state court records and interviews with elections officials and found no evidence that any noncitizens tried to vote in the state in the preceding two and half years. Faulty purge efforts in Ohio and Texas last year likewise swept in eligible citizens.
Targeting election officials
The SAVE Act would put election officials in a legally precarious situation. If the bill were to become law, election officials could be held civilly and criminally liable for registering someone who did not provide documentary proof of citizenship, even if the official made an honest mistake and even if the person who registered was, in fact, a citizen. These penalties are particularly problematic because the SAVE Act purports to give local election officials discretion to determine whether an applicant lacking the required documents has otherwise provided sufficient evidence of their citizenship status to register.
In essence, the SAVE Act would handcuff local election officials. On one hand, the bill saddles them with the responsibility of hashing out the practical details of implementation. On the other, it threatens those same officials with criminal consequences if they get things wrong. The risk of criminal and civil penalties could cause election officials to deny registration applications submitted by eligible American citizens. And the threats of prosecution and lawsuits will further intensify turnover among election officials, who have left the field in significant numbers over the last five years in the face of harassment and other threats.
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The SAVE Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirement is a solution in search of a problem. Claims about widespread voting by noncitizens have been roundly debunked. Studies show only U.S. citizens vote, and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. State-level investigations into voter rolls have repeatedly confirmed that fact.
Congress can and should fix the very real challenges that undermine our democracy. Instead, with the SAVE Act, election deniers and conspiracy theorists are seeking to tilt the election system in their favor by blocking millions of eligible American citizens from voting.
