Last week, Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate launched a renewed push to pass the SAVE Act, introducing two new bills that advance its “show your papers” requirement for voter registration. The first effort to pass the SAVE Act last year failed in the face of nationwide public opposition. These new bills are yet another effort to undermine Americans’ freedom to vote and make this unpopular policy the law of the land.
In every form, the SAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don’t even have a passport. Millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate. The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.
Just like the SAVE Act of 2025, the new SAVE Act proposals would inject chaos into election administration. They would place a massive unfunded burden on state and local election officials. And they would expose those officials to significant legal risk. The bills would leave it up to local officials to decide whether a voter who lacks one of the specified documents has done enough to prove citizenship. Officials who make an honest mistake could face civil and criminal penalties. An election official could even be punished for registering an eligible American citizen, just for failing to collect all the right paperwork at the right time.
The three versions of the SAVE Act would go into effect either immediately after enactment, or within the next year or two, depending on the specific provision. Such a rushed implementation of massive policy changes would wreak havoc on election administration, unleashing confusion that will itself undoubtedly prevent some American citizens from voting.
Though all versions of the SAVE Act would block millions of American citizens from voting, the bills in the House and Senate each contain unique additional obstacles. The anti-voter provisions in the House’s new version, formally titled the Make Elections Great Again Act, are so numerous that they require a bullet-pointed list:
The bill not only requires proof of citizenship, but also proof of residence in order to register. This could block even more Americans from voting. Roughly nine percent of the population has moved within a state in the past year, but many will not update their driver’s licenses until they expire.
The bill would require photo ID to vote, providing a narrow list of acceptable IDs more restrictive than the voter ID laws in every state but Ohio. For example, the bill prohibits the use of student IDs (even those issued by state universities), and accepts tribal IDs only with an expiration date, even though many tribal IDs do not contain them.
The legislation would mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, placing enormous burdens on election officials and ending the 90-day quiet period that protects voters from being mistakenly thrown off the rolls right before Election Day.
The bill would prohibit universal vote by mail, requiring all mail voters to submit an application in order to receive a mail ballot. This would end the longstanding principal method of voting in eight states and Washington, DC.
The House bill appears to create an exception from the “show your papers” requirement for states that require full Social Security numbers to register, but only three states are allowed to require such data because of privacy protections in federal law.
The Senate’s new version of the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, not only requires voters to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register — it requires them to do so again when they cast a ballot. The bill would exempt states from this second “show your papers” requirement only if states have been regularly handing over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security since June of 2025 for comparison with the agency’s citizenship verification tool (confusingly named the SAVE program). But that provision is only intended to strong-arm state officials trying to protect their voters’ privacy. Dozens of states have refused to provide voter files requested by the Trump administration because of concerns about misuse of such data. And those concerns are well founded: The administration conceded in January that DOGE team members within the Social Security Administration agreed to turn over state voter rolls to an advocacy group seeking to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” In other words, the Senate’s bill punishes citizens of states that have been protecting their privacy.
The SAVE Act solves nothing. All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes — like Louisiana and Utah did recently — have repeatedly confirmed that fact.
These bills are part of a broader federal agenda to sow distrust in our elections, undermine election administration, and discourage Americans from making their voices heard. The SAVE Act, in any form, would block millions of American citizens from voting. Congress should stand firm once again and reject the SAVE Act.
