President Donald Trump’s priority elections bill has languished in the Senate for the past several weeks as some GOP politicians hesitate to upend precedent for voter registration in federal elections before the midterms.
That hasn’t stopped lawmakers in several red states from introducing similar changes for their elections. Certain provisions that mirror the SAVE America Act — particularly going through voter rolls to remove already registered citizens deemed non-eligible — could put up hurdles to voting for married women, trans people and others who have changed their names.
Republican governors in Florida, Mississippi, Utah and South Dakota recently signed bills that would require documentary proof of citizenship for people looking to register ahead of state and local elections. One is on its way to the desk of Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. And several other state legislatures have moved toward tightening voter ID and registration laws over the past year.
Though a few states have already had similar bills on the books — including Arizona, whose 2004 proof-of-citizenship law has weathered several legal challenges, including a Supreme Court case — Trump’s talk of uprooting already rare election fraud led to more legislatures scrambling to implement new limitations over the last two years.
“Even though the efforts to enact these extreme citizenship policies at the federal level have run into roadblocks, whether that’s [Trump’s 2025] executive order being blocked or the Senate not taking up the SAVE America Act, there have been several state legislatures that have moved in this direction,” said Chris Diaz, director of legislative tracking at Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks election policy.
These laws usually require proof of citizenship in the form of a passport or birth certificate — documents that are difficult for many Americans to access or obtain. Half of U.S. citizens do not have a passport. Voting rights advocates say these state and local laws, like the proposed SAVE America Act, could more heavily impact married women and trans people who have changed their names — particularly in states where existing voters, not just new registrants, have to be re-checked against federal and local databases.
Of the 12 states that currently have proof-of-citizenship laws for local election registrants, 10 are Republican trifectas — meaning both legislative chambers and the governor’s office are held by the same party.
Beyond the burden the laws could place on people looking to register to vote, administrators say they need a longer runway to successfully stage elections and inform residents of policy changes. Critics of these voter registration overhauls also point to the additional administrative costs and lawsuit payouts, including the millions paid over time by Arizona and Kansas, which faced a legal challenge in 2018.
This spring, Utah and South Dakota enacted their bills requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in state and local elections. Utah’s will take effect May 6, ahead of its June 23 primaries, while South Dakota’s will take effect immediately before its June 2 primaries.
Mississippi’s Safeguard Honesty Integrity in Elections for Lasting Democracy (SHIELD) Act requires voter rolls to be verified through state and federal databases. If an individual can’t be confirmed, they must eventually provide proof of their citizenship to vote in later elections — proof that could include a valid passport, though Mississippi has the second-highest share of citizens without valid passports in the nation, according to data from the Voting Rights Lab. The state already held primaries in March, and the law goes into effect July 1.
Tennessee’s state legislature recently sent a bill authorizing county election administrators to verify voters’ citizenship status through a federal database to Lee, who is likely to sign it.
And Florida’s law, which won’t take effect until after the midterms, will also mandate existing voter roll verification, require proof of citizenship to register and impose stricter voter ID restrictions. Advocacy groups, including the League of Women Voters of Florida and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit to block its implementation — naming elderly Black voters and Puerto Ricans whose birth certificates were issued before 2010 among the communities that would be affected.
“State voter registration systems aren’t set up to contain a record of what documentation has been presented. There’s a huge IT component to this,” Diaz said. “This is another example of a state trying to impose new requirements for elections without thinking through the timelines and costs.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database used to verify citizenship status — as mandated in the recent Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida laws, among others — usually sees a low error rate, but has mistakenly flagged eligible voters as noncitizens in the past in states like Texas. Naturalized citizens are at particular risk for being flagged, said Andrew Garber, a counsel for the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Even if a person is able to resolve their case and provide evidence, receiving an erroneous message in itself can be jarring for people, he added, and could potentially turn them off from correcting the record.
Several states will have ballot initiatives this November to decide whether to amend local constitutions or laws to clarify that only citizens can vote, including Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, South Dakota and Alaska. In Michigan, a similar measure has not yet been placed on the ballot, as the state elections bureau has not verified the signatures required to advance.
Arizona has required proof of citizenship to vote in local elections since 2004, but a patchwork of laws, errors and court rulings created logistical hurdles for putting those requirements into practice. Because they run a bifurcated elections system that handles federal and state contests separately as mandated by the National Voter Registration Act, Arizona and a handful of other states have “federal-only voters,” tens of thousands of people who vote in only national elections because they have not presented accepted proof of citizenship to the state. Garber said that while those numbers don’t offer insight into how Arizona’s laws impact individual voter registration, they illustrate the hurdles such voters face in registering with the state — where elections have been won by the smallest of margins.
Experts worry that the new proof of citizenship laws and other state proposals will run into similar snafus, and further affect voters in hubs like college campuses, which tend to lean more liberal.
“These are really big administrative burdens. It might sound really simple, like you just have to check someone’s passport and they’re good to go,” Garber said. He also noted the new systems for training election officials and maintaining voter rolls will take more time to implement than is available — especially since local governments already struggle with election administration funding. “The idea that these systems can be up and running in the next few months before the midterms is a fanciful one.”
Some women in other states that already added proof-of-citizenship requirements say they have felt the burden of finding documentary evidence — including voters in Texas who worried about reconciling their varying names after the state advanced voter roll review legislation last year — though experts say the wider effect would still have to be studied as the laws settle. New Hampshire’s 2024 proof-of-citizenship law is also facing legal challenges for its disproportionate impact on women who have changed their surnames.
Federal lawmakers are set to return from recess this week and are set to take up the SAVE America Act again for debate alongside ongoing DHS funding negotiations, which has been shut down since February 14. Despite ramped up pressure from the White House and some GOP stalwarts, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, has not indicated progress on elections negotiations within the upper chamber.
Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order on March 31 that would, among other conditions, require DHS and other agencies to create a list of confirmed American citizens, as well as direct agencies to withhold federal funds from non-compliant local governments — all stipulations that bypass parameters set up by the SAVE America Act. Democratic lawmakers and nearly two dozen states sued soon after over the order.