Florida is at the front lines of a partisan battle over access to the ballot.
On April 29, 2026 the state legislature approved a redrawn congressional map designed to give Republicans four additional seats in the House of Representatives. The new map, submitted by Gov. Ron DeSantis just two days prior, was approved within hours of SCOTUS issuing its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that eviscerated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, among other things.
Historically, the Supreme Court had found that states had the right to create such districts to protect minority voting powers. But this Court’s conservative majority ruled 6-3 in favor of the plaintiffs, further gutting a landmark piece of legislation from the Civil Rights era and effectively enabling Florida’s gerrymandered map.
Florida also recently passed a voter ID law requiring not only proof of citizenship before registering to vote, but also radically restricting what types of photo ID can be used to verify one’s identity to election officials. Going forward, student IDs, those issued by retirement homes, and public assistance ID cards are no longer acceptable forms of identification at the polls.
Being a Black woman based in Florida’s capital, I’ve seen firsthand how my state has become a testing ground for far-right ideas that often become laws and almost invariably affect people like me.
Once a political battleground, Florida has been a solid Republican stronghold since 2020. Republicans now hold a supermajority in the state legislature, and since taking office in 2019, DeSantis has unleashed an assault on civil liberties.
The SAVE America Act
Florida’s new voter ID law is modeled on a Republican-sponsored federal bill. The SAVE America Act would require Americans to present proof of U.S. citizenship and a photo ID to register to vote or update their voter registration information.
“Your own driver’s license wouldn’t be sufficient to be able to cast your ballot. We’re talking passports or original birth certificates,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat representing California, told ABC7 in April 2026. “If you’re a woman who changed her name when she got married, good luck trying to meet the documentary requirements.”
The month before, Senate Majority Leader John Thune had signaled that the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which passed the House in February 2026, would almost certainly die in the Senate.
The federal SAVE America Act would directly impact the more than 28 million people nationwide—roughly 12 percent of registered voters—who don’t have ready access to a passport or a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID.
The legislation would disproportionately affect those who are already marginalized, particularly Black Americans and other people of color, who are less likely than white voters to possess acceptable forms of identification. Only about half of U.S. citizens have passports, and lower-income individuals are less likely to possess one.
Anybody whose current legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate could find themselves unable to vote. That includes approximately 69 million American women who took their spouse’s last name.
Name-matching requirements would also affect trans people who have legally changed their birth names. For a number of reasons, many elderly voters also lack an acceptable birth certificate.
States advance SAVE Acts
But while the public’s attention is focused on the federal battle over voting rights, Republican governors are quietly passing their own versions of this legislation as part of a continuing effort to restrict voting access.
In addition to Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah have all all recently adopted legislation based on the federal bill, which will place additional, undue burdens on voters.
On March 25, 2026, Utah passed legislation requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship either at registration or prior to voting in state elections. Until their citizenship is confirmed, both new and existing registrants in Utah may only vote in federal elections under the law. Voters flagged as non-citizens face removal from voter rolls within 30 days but may cast a provisional ballot.
The following day, Gov. Larry Rhoden enacted South Dakota’s version of the SAVE Act, which requires new registrants—but not those already registered—to provide proof of U.S. citizenship before registering to vote in state elections.
Mississippi and Florida quickly followed suit.
Mississippi’s SHIELD Act requires the citizenship of every voter to be verified through state and federal databases. People flagged as potential noncitizens must provide proof of U.S. citizenship within 30 days of the notification. Alternatively, they may cast a provisional ballot, but must present proof of citizenship within five days of voting for it to count.
These laws ignore the fact that voter fraud is extremely rare, and has never affected an election outcome. Naturalized citizens, people of color, low-income individuals, the elderly, people from rural communities, disabled folks, and people experiencing housing insecurity are most likely to be impacted by the bills, which make it harder for voters to cast their ballots.
And what’s worse: They’re being enacted just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
Florida is a right-wing policy incubator
Over the past few years, Florida’s executive and legislative branches have attacked abortion access, the right to protest, LGBTQ+ rights, free speech, immigrants, and vaccine mandates. They’ve banned books, D.E.I initiatives, and critical race theory.
Their attacks on voting rights have been no less authoritarian. Measures passed prior to 2026 added new ID requirements for casting mail-in ballots and stifled third-party voter registration efforts by narrowing the window to file forms and creating more administrative burdens, among other changes.
DeSantis and other Republicans say that these laws are necessary to preserve Florida’s election security process, which they tout as exemplary.
“Since 2020, Florida has enacted more significant election integrity reforms than any other state in the country,” Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd remarked after DeSantis signed the state’s version of the SAVE Act.
But the Republican view of “integrity” seems to exclude traditionally Democratic voting blocs.
In November 2018, for example, Florida residents voted to overturn the state’s strict felony disenfranchisement law, which dates back to its 1838 territorial constitution. Black and Latino people were disproportionately affected by this law.
Amendment 4, which allowed most Floridians with felony convictions to automatically regain voting rights after completing the terms of their sentence, passed with nearly 65 percent of the vote.
In June 2019, DeSantis responded to the enfranchisement of nearly 1.5 million people by signing a new law requiring those with felony convictions to pay the full amount of their court costs prior to voting. This is, in effect, a poll tax—a favored Southern voter-suppression method that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in state elections in 1966. (The 24th Amendment, passed in 1964, prohibited poll taxes in federal elections.)
Because Florida has no centralized system for tracking financial obligations, many people with felony convictions have no idea how much they actually owe. Those with older cases may have trouble locating records of past payments.
Having once worked for a North Florida clerk of courts, I’ve witnessed challenges tracking payment of court fees and conviction-related fines across all 67 counties.
Florida Republicans have also previously employed gerrymandering to increase their political leverage. In 2022, DeSantis made the unprecedented move of vetoing congressional maps proposed by the state legislature and submitting his own. This gave Republicans 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats (one Democratic seat is currently vacant) and dismantled North Florida’s majority-minority District 5, which had been redrawn in 2015 to protect minority voting rights.
Ironically, the district was broken up on the grounds that it had been created through race-based gerrymandering—a practice the Supreme Court once supported.
SAVE Act could hurt Republican voters, too
Voter ID restrictions tend to hurt traditional Democratic voting blocs. But state-level SAVE Acts may inadvertently suppress Republican turnout, too.
Evidence suggests that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to rely on birth certificates. For example, about 10 percent of Republican women kept their last name after marriage compared to 20 percent of Democrats, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey.
Because they are less reliable than passports as proof of citizenship, state-level SAVE Acts could result in Republican voters having to clear additional administrative hurdles. In red states with large rural populations, for instance, many conservative voters (especially those who are lower-income) may not have the means or ability to travel to government offices or pay for the necessary documents.
But maybe Republicans have taken this into account. It’s possible they’ve decided that hurting their own voters a little—in hopes of hurting likely Democratic voters a lot—is worth the collateral damage.
The post The Federal SAVE Act Will Likely Die in the Senate. But in Florida, It’s Already Law: Analysis appeared first on Rewire News Group.