The SAVE Act Bill: Requirements, Status, and State Precedents

The SAVE Act — formally the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, reintroduced in the 119th Congress as the SAVE America Act — is a federal bill that would require voters to show documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering for federal elections and to present photo identification at the polls. The House passed it on February 18, 2026, by a vote of 218–213, but the Senate rejected it on June 4, 2026, when supporters could not overcome the filibuster.¹ The bill is not law. Similar requirements are, however, moving through state legislatures and an executive order covering some of the same ground.

What the SAVE Act Would Require

The bill would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Its central provisions:²

Anyone registering to vote in a federal election would have to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. Acceptable documents include a passport, a birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a REAL ID that indicates citizenship status.³
All voters would have to present a photo ID at the polls. Student IDs would not qualify. Tribal IDs would need to include an expiration date.⁴
People who register by mail would have to deliver their citizenship documents in person to an election office. Critics say this would effectively end mail and online registration.⁵
States would have to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to identify noncitizens.¹
Election officials who register an applicant without proper documentation would face federal criminal fines and up to five years in prison. The bill also creates a private right of action, letting individuals sue officials who register voters without the required proof.²
The bill would take effect on the date of enactment, with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission required to issue guidance within 10 days. No federal funding is provided to states for implementation.²

Where the Bill Stands

The current version grew out of H.R. 8281 in the 118th Congress, which the House passed 221–198 on July 10, 2024. Only five Democrats joined 216 Republicans in support, and the Senate never took it up.⁶

Representative Chip Roy of Texas leads the effort in the House, with 110 Republican cosponsors.⁷ Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah introduced companion legislation in the Senate.⁸ Senator Rick Scott of Florida introduced a separate Senate version, S. 1383, in April 2025.⁹

After House passage in February 2026, the bill sat in the Senate for months. Some Republicans discussed changing the filibuster rules to pass the measure with a simple majority, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota concluded the votes were not there. “It’s about the votes. It’s about the math,” Thune said. On June 4, 2026, the measure was put to a vote as an amendment to an immigration funding package and officially failed, ending its path through the 119th Congress.¹

The Case Supporters Make

Supporters frame the bill as a safeguard against noncitizen voting. Senator Cornyn cited an estimated ten million unauthorized immigrants entering the country and argued that easy access to driver’s licenses in some states creates openings for illegal registration.⁸ Speaker Mike Johnson and other supporters point to what they describe as gaps in state registration systems that could allow noncitizens to decide election outcomes.¹⁰

Noncitizen voting in federal elections has been illegal since the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Penalties include criminal prosecution and deportation. State audits have consistently found the practice to be rare:

Georgia’s 2024 statewide audit of more than eight million registered voters found 20 noncitizens on the rolls, nine of whom had voted.¹⁰
Iowa’s 2024 review identified 35 noncitizens who voted and 277 who were registered out of nearly 2.3 million voters, with initial higher numbers reduced significantly after cross-referencing with federal immigration records.¹⁰
Utah’s 2025 review of more than two million voters found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes.²
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto said Nevada had identified only two noncitizen votes out of seven million cast since 2008.¹¹

Proponents often cite a 2014 study by Jesse Richman claiming 6.4% of ballots in the 2008 election were cast by noncitizens. The study has been widely criticized for methodological flaws, and the researchers whose survey data it relied on said the data was not designed to support that conclusion. In a 2018 federal trial in Kansas, the judge called Richman’s testimony “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed.”¹⁰

The Case Opponents Make

Voting rights groups, civil rights organizations, and Democratic lawmakers argue the bill would block millions of eligible citizens while addressing a problem barely present in the data.

The central concern is access to documents. Research cited by the Brennan Center for Justice estimates more than 21 million U.S. citizens lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate.¹² A Bipartisan Policy Center analysis found roughly 12% of registered voters — about 28.4 million voting-age citizens — do not hold the documentation most likely to satisfy the bill.³ Half of Americans do not have a valid passport, and using a birth certificate creates complications for anyone whose name has changed, including roughly 70 million married people.¹³

Specific populations would carry more of the burden. The Native American Rights Fund argues voters on reservations in remote areas could face trips of more than 100 miles to deliver documents in person, and that the bill’s rules on tribal IDs, which often do not include birth information, would create additional barriers. Younger and elderly voters are also less likely to hold the required documents.¹⁴ Cortez Masto argued on the Senate floor that document costs, including the $165 passport fee, function as a modern poll tax.¹¹

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that only about 6% of voters currently register in person, meaning the in-person document requirement would upend the way most Americans sign up to vote.¹³

Cost is another sticking point. The National Association of Counties estimated the bill would impose $510 million in additional costs per election cycle on state and local governments, roughly 11 times the $45 million in federal Help America Vote Act election security funding for fiscal year 2026. That figure did not include infrastructure costs for states with all-mail voting. NACo also projected implementation would require between 2.5 million and five million additional poll worker training hours and could prevent 2.37 million voters from registering because of documentation delays.¹⁵ Opponents warn that the criminal penalties and private right of action against election officials would make it harder to recruit and retain workers in a field that already has high turnover.¹⁶

What Happened When Kansas Tried This

Kansas offers the most cited real-world test. The state implemented a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement in 2013 under then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach. While the law was in effect, 31,089 people could not complete their voter registration, about 12% of everyone who tried. Over roughly two decades, the state identified 39 noncitizens who had registered, most through administrative errors rather than deliberate fraud.¹⁰

A federal district court struck down the Kansas law on June 18, 2018, in Fish v. Schwab, finding it violated the National Voter Registration Act and unconstitutionally burdened the right to vote.¹⁷ The Tenth Circuit affirmed in April 2020, holding that Kansas had not shown its federal attestation requirement — a signed oath under penalty of perjury — was insufficient to screen out noncitizens. The court found that the “magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters” could not be justified by the “scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud.”¹⁸

State Laws Doing the Same Thing

Even without a federal SAVE Act, several states have adopted their own proof-of-citizenship requirements. As of mid-2026, Arizona, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming had requirements in effect for the 2026 midterms. Florida, South Dakota, and Utah enacted new laws in early 2026, and Indiana, Ohio, and Mississippi adopted requirements for certain groups of voters in 2025. Alabama and Georgia have similar laws on the books but are blocked by court orders from enforcing them.¹⁹

Arizona has the longest record, requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration since Proposition 200 passed in 2004. Because the NVRA prohibits citizenship documentation requirements for federal registration, Arizona runs a bifurcated voter roll. Roughly 47,000 voters who registered using the federal form without providing citizenship documents are classified as “federal only” and can vote only in presidential, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House races.²⁰

The Executive Order Covering Similar Ground

President Trump signed an executive order on March 31, 2026, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” which pursues some of the SAVE Act’s goals through executive power. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to compile lists of confirmed citizens and send them to state election officials at least 60 days before federal elections. It also directs the Postmaster General to establish rules restricting the mailing of ballots to individuals on state-approved participation lists and authorizes withholding federal funds from noncompliant states.²¹

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia sued to block the order in State of California v. Trump, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on April 3, 2026. The case, before Judge Indira Talwani, remained in active litigation as of mid-June 2026.²²

Not the Same as the 2019 SAFE Act

The SAVE Act is sometimes confused with the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, or SAFE Act (H.R. 2722), a separate 116th Congress bill sponsored by Representative Zoe Lofgren of California. That 2019 legislation focused on election security infrastructure — paper ballots, post-election risk-limiting audits, and domestic manufacturing of voting machines — not voter eligibility. It passed the House 225–184 in June 2019 but did not advance in the Senate.²³ Similar acronyms, different bills.

1
NPR. SAVE Act Senate Vote Trump
2
Bipartisan Policy Center. Five Things to Know About the SAVE Act
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Bipartisan Policy Center. Do Documentary Proof of Citizenship Requirements Disadvantage One Party More Than the Other
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Brennan Center for Justice. New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans From Voting
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Democrats – Committee on House Administration. SAVE Act Section by Section
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U.S. House of Representatives. Roll Call 345 – H.R. 8281
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Congress.gov. H.R. 22 Cosponsors
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Office of Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn, Lee, Roy Introduce the SAVE America Act
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Congress.gov. S. 1383 All Info
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Votebeat. Noncitizen Voting Is Rare, Research Shows
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Office of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto Exposes Republican SAVE America Act as a Voter Suppression Bill
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Brennan Center for Justice. Anti-Voter SAVE Act Must Be Stopped
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NAACP Legal Defense Fund. SAVE Act Saves No One – Voter Suppression Bill Explained
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Native American Rights Fund. SAVE Act Hurts Native Voters
15
National Association of Counties. Senate Vote on SAVE America Act – Major Impacts on County Election Administration
16
Issue One. Explainer – SAVE, SAVE America, and MEGA Acts
17
ACLU. Fish v. Schwab (Formerly Fish v. Kobach)
18
Justia. Fish v. Schwab, No. 18-3133
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Brennan Center for Justice. States Already Enacting Harmful SAVE Act Policies Requiring Proof
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Arizona Clean Elections Commission. Federal Only Voters
21
The White House. Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections
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Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. State of California v. Trump
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Congress.gov. H.R. 2722 – Securing America’s Federal Elections Act