WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans pressed forward Tuesday with a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot, despite long odds the legislation will ever become law amid bipartisan opposition. 

The 51-48 vote to formally begin debate on the measure, which GOP lawmakers have named the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, only starts the process. Senators are expected to vote on several amendments in the days, or possibly weeks, ahead. 

But at least 60 lawmakers will be needed to end floor debate, a highly unlikely prospect with Democrats arguing the bill would disenfranchise millions of voters. 

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote against starting debate. North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis didn’t vote. 

Murkowski wrote in a social media post last month the November midterm elections are “fast approaching” and that implementing “new federal requirements now, when states are deep into their preparations, would negatively impact election integrity by forcing election officials to scramble to adhere to new policies likely without the necessary resources. 

“Ensuring public trust in our elections is at the core of our democracy, but federal overreach is not how we achieve this.”

Trump threatens retaliation

President Donald Trump has made enacting nationwide changes to voting his top legislative priority ahead of the midterm elections, although Republicans swept unified control of government less than two years ago. 

He wrote in a social media post Tuesday morning that he plans to campaign against anyone who doesn’t support the legislation, which the House passed last month.

“Only sick, demented, or deranged people in the House or Senate could vote against THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” he wrote. “If they do, each one of these points, separately, will be used against the user in his/her political campaign for office – A guaranteed loss!”

Dems predict millions kicked off voting rolls

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, said during floor remarks the legislation would require Americans “to run through an obstacle course of red tape unlike anything we have ever seen in voter registration.”

The bill becoming law, he said, would lead to millions of Americans being kicked off voter rolls due to a requirement that states run their list of registered voters through a “deeply flawed” Department of Homeland Security database.

“If you’re kicked off the rolls, you may never be told,” he said. “There’s no requirement to let you know.”

Schumer argued the bill is less about ensuring only Americans vote in elections and more about Republican concerns they will lose at least one chamber of Congress later this year. 

“It’s funny. I don’t remember MAGA Republicans screaming about stolen elections and voter fraud after the 2024 election that they won,” he said. “Well, the same rules that governed the 2024 election are going to be the ones that govern the 2026 election. The only difference is that this time MAGA Republicans know they’re in trouble politically. So now they’re suddenly saying the system is compromised and broken and it needs to be changed. It’s all lies.”

77 instances of noncitizen voting 

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and anyone found guilty could face fines and up to a year in prison. There are limited instances of people not eligible to vote actually casting a ballot, according to analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center of data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, an especially conservative think tank. 

BPC’s examination “found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023” and that “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., reiterated a few hours before the procedural step that “the votes aren’t there” to pass the bill via a talking filibuster, a path several of his members want him to take. 

“So what we are doing is we are having a fulsome debate on the floor of the United States Senate, which is something that I think the Senate has done in the past, and probably should do a lot more of,” he said. “But we’ll have it up. Everybody will have their say. At some point, we’ll have votes.  And we’ll see where the votes are.”

A talking filibuster would require Democratic senators to give a series of floor speeches in order to delay or prevent final passage. That process could tie up the Senate floor for months.

Thune said he wasn’t sure when votes on amendments would begin, but that he expects the process to last “for the foreseeable future.”

“I think at least for right now, there’ll be some flexibility to see where the road leads,” he said. 

Mail-in voting, gender-affirming surgeries, sports

Trump has asked GOP senators to add several provisions to the legislation, including new restrictions on mail-in voting, a federal prohibition on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth and a new law barring transgender women from participating in women’s sports. 

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Policy Committee chair, said she doesn’t believe the federal government should tell states how to manage mail-in ballots. 

“A lot of states, red states and blue, have more than a majority of the votes that are mail-in ballots,” she said. “So I think we’ve got to be careful there.”

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said that once debate on the SAVE America Act has concluded, he wants GOP leaders to hold a floor vote on whether to keep the rule that requires at least 60 senators vote to limit debate on bills, known as the legislative filibuster. 

“I think the days of the minority preventing legislation from passing is over. Because Democrat voters, they want their members to end it. Republican voters want us to end it,” he said. “So in the end, it’ll be that public pressure that I think will eventually end the filibuster. And I’d just rather beat them to the punch so we can pass things like SAVE America Act.”

Thune said during an afternoon press conference he believes the 60-vote procedural hurdle should remain in place because “throughout history it’s protected Republicans and conservative priorities and principles a lot more often than it’s protected Democrats.”

Photo ID

The bill would require local election officials to ensure anyone registering to vote proves they are an American, likely by showing a passport or a birth certificate. Then, when people go to cast a ballot by mail, during early voting, or on Election Day, they would need to show a valid photo ID, like a driver’s license or military identification card. 

The legislation would require state governments to submit their voter rolls to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so its officials can run them through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system to check if anyone already registered isn’t a U.S. citizen. 

The legislation doesn’t provide state or local governments with any extra money or time to implement the changes, if it were to become law. 

The Bipartisan Policy Center writes in a brief about the legislation that the organization “recommends that policymakers avoid making major changes in an election year given the likelihood that they result in administrative errors and create confusion for voters.”

The three BPC experts who analyzed the bill said it “prioritizes expediency over precision.” 

“The act becomes effective on the date of enactment, giving states no time to adjust processes,” they wrote. “It also requires that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission offer implementation guidance to states within just 10 days of enactment.”

Lawsuits

The legislation would give private citizens the ability to sue election officials who register someone without evidence of U.S. citizenship.

Jeffrey Thorsby, legislative director at the National Association of Counties, wrote in a post about the legislation’s impacts that the “liability provisions could discourage election workers and volunteers from serving at a time when many counties already face recruitment challenges.” 

“Currently, the onus on a non-citizen who registers or votes is on the illegal voter,” he wrote. “SAVE America Act proposes a radical change in how we punish fraudulent voting.”

The voting overhaul measure that the U.S. Senate began debating Tuesday would cause major headaches for underfunded state and local election officials, without meaningfully stopping fraud, according to a collection of voting rights advocates and elections officers.

The so-called SAVE America Act, which President Donald Trump is relentlessly pushing, would create chaos for state and local elections administrators by immediately imposing several new requirements without adding funding, former North Carolina elections chief Karen Brinson Bell said on a press call Tuesday organized by Washington U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell.

“I cannot emphasize enough the Herculean effort that the SAVE America Act would present for election officials across this country,” Brinson Bell, who now advises election officials as a co-founder of the group Advance Elections, said. “Please do not set our country or these public servants up for failure. Bring us to the table. Develop this legislation properly and provide adequate funding and resources so we can all succeed.”

No new money

The bill would initially add $35 million in costs for Washington state to administer this year’s midterm elections, Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey said. The measure would cost an estimated additional $12 million annually in presidential election years for the state’s elections administrators, he added.

But it would not provide federal funding for states and localities to meet the new costs.

“When I looked at the SAVE America Act to understand how it would affect election administration, I did a control-F for the dollar sign, and I did not see a single dollar, much less the hundreds of millions needed to implement these changes,” Brinson Bell said.

The bill, which Trump and other proponents say is necessary to stop immigrants from voting, would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. They would also have to provide a photo ID at polling places.

But the measure “is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem,” Kimsey said on Tuesday’s call. Noncitizens voting in federal elections is exceedingly rare.

Barriers for voting by mail

Overall, the bill would make voting more difficult, especially for people who have changed their names, tribal citizens and people without photo ID, participants on the call said. That counters the goal of elections officials: to make voting easier.

“The problem isn’t that the wrong people are voting,” Kimsey said. “The problem is that not enough people are voting.”

The bill would also create barriers for vote-by-mail, which Washington and other states have used for decades. 

The system has increased voter participation and is widely popular across party lines. 

“The state of Washington’s vote-by-mail system is such a strong system,” Cantwell said. “The whole country should be moving more towards that and not away from it.”

Voting integrity

The bill’s backers, including most Republicans in Congress, say it would erect commonsense safeguards to protect U.S. elections.

In a Tuesday floor speech setting up debate on the measure, U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune called it “essential.”

“If there’s anything essential to the integrity of elections, it’s ensuring that those who are registered to vote are eligible to vote – and that those who show up to vote at polling places are … who they say they are,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said.

The way to do that, he added, was to require proof of citizenship and photo identification.

Photo IDs, though, aren’t as universal as commonly thought, League of Women Voters of Maine Executive Director Chrissy Hart said.

Eighteen percent of citizens older than 65 lack a photo ID, as well as 16% of Latino voters, 25% of Black voters and 15% of low-income Americans, Hart said.

Election denial

Kimsey, who identified as a Republican during his first run for office in 1998 and became an independent after the pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol following the 2020 election, was asked if the measure was a continuation of Trump’s efforts to undermine U.S. elections.

He answered that what he deemed the “election denial movement” lost momentum after Trump’s 2024 victory, but that it seemed to be reappearing ahead of the midterms.

“In my view, this is nothing more than a very clumsy — and I hope not effective — but a very clumsy attempt to create chaos in this year’s midterm elections,” he said.

U.S. Sen Maria Cantwell, a Washington state Democrat, will register a protest of President Donald Trump’s attempt to exert more control over election infrastructure by bringing her state’s secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, as her guest to the State of the Union Tuesday evening.

Trump has pressured senators to approve a House-passed bill that would require the public to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, involve the federal Department of Homeland Security in elections and disallow universal vote-by-mail that is popular in Washington, Oregon and other states.

Members of Congress often bring guests to the State of the Union to spotlight particular issues and Democrats this year are raising a host of objections to the president’s tariffs program and his immigration crackdown — including a weekslong operation in Minneapolis that resulted in two U.S. citizens’ deaths at the hands of immigration agents — and other issues.

Cantwell told States Newsroom in a phone interview hours before Trump’s address was set to begin that changing election infrastructure could have more long term effects on U.S. democracy than other Trump policies.

“I’m not saying that the tariff issue didn’t have an impact,” Cantwell said. “I’m not saying it’s not horrific that you killed two American citizens who were just trying to express their rights to free speech. But you could upend a lot by changing our election system overnight. I don’t know how you recover from that immediately.”

The Republican bill would amount to nationalizing elections, a contradiction of the Constitution’s provision that states administer elections, Cantwell and Hobbs said.

The framers of the Constitution gave that power to states to protect against the executive branch overreaching, Hobbs said.

The bill would violate that idea, Cantwell said.

“We would be basically saying, ‘It’s okay for a federal leader … and their agency, Homeland Security, to mess around and determine who’s eligible to vote,” Cantwell said. “The reason the separation of powers exist is … so that you didn’t have that federal control, so that people did have faith that they weren’t being manipulated by the federal power.”

The GOP’s championing of the bill follows President Donald Trump’s comments advocating to nationalize elections, a mid-decade campaign to redraw state congressional districts in Republicans’ favor and more than two dozen Department of Justice lawsuits demanding Democratic-led states turn over unredacted voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security.

Senate rules at risk?

Cantwell’s worries about the bill, known as the SAVE Act, have grown after seeing Trump’s pressure campaign on Republicans, as well as a recent sign of support for the bill from moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine and comments from the bill’s Senate sponsor, Mike Lee of Utah, about adjusting the chamber’s rules to ensure the bill’s passage.

And Cantwell said she expects Trump to mention the issue during Tuesday’s address.

Under Senate rules and tradition, 60 of the 100 senators must approve a procedural vote to move to final passage of nearly all legislation. With Republicans holding 53 seats, that means bills must have bipartisan support to pass the chamber. 

Lee has said he wanted to tweak Senate rules so that opponents of a bill would have to continuously speak on the floor to block consideration of a bill that would otherwise have the support to pass.

Cantwell said she and Hobbs would seek out opportunities Tuesday evening to bring Republicans to their side of the issue.

“He and I got a busy night tonight,” she said. “We gotta go buttonhole a bunch of Republican senators.”

Noncitizens and voting

Republican supporters of the bill say it will enhance election security and ensure that noncitizens do not vote in U.S. elections.

But noncitizens are already barred from federal elections and instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare, even in studies by conservative groups.

And the bill presents several provisions that could reduce voter participation, Cantwell and Hobbs said. 

Many Americans do not have a passport or easy access to their birth certificate. Nearly 70 million married women have changed their names, creating an additional barrier to voter registration.

“I don’t think they’re thinking about these things,” Hobbs said.

The bill would also imperil Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system in which every voter is sent a ballot that can be returned through the mail. 

Vote by mail “has nothing to do with partisanship,” Hobbs said. “It’s about convenience of the voter to be able to take the time to choose the people they want to choose. It’s about security, it’s about transparency, it’s not partisanship.”

The system, which for years was popular among Republicans and Democrats for its convenience, became a partisan issue when Trump partially blamed his 2020 election loss on the mail-in voting increase put in place during that COVID-era election.

“We’re here to evangelize that this system has enfranchised people to vote more and have a higher turnout, which is what our goal should be,” Cantwell said Tuesday. “That’s why the League of Women Voters are on our side in this debate and against the SAVE Act, because the whole goal is to have a more participatory government and vote by mail is delivering that.”

OTTAWA, Kan. — When Kansas began requiring residents to prove their U.S. citizenship before voting more than a decade ago, Steven Wayne Fish tried and failed.

A first-time father in his 30s at the time, he wanted a say in debates over public school funding despite having never voted before. But Fish, who was born on a since-decommissioned Air Force base in Illinois, couldn’t find his birth certificate, leaving him unable to register for the 2014 general election.

A federal court eventually blocked the Kansas law following a lawsuit in which Fish was the namesake plaintiff. For years, the Fish legal case served as a warning to politicians who wanted voters to produce documents proving their citizenship.

That’s changing, as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress try to impose a similar proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement nationwide through a long-shot proposal called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or SAVE America Act.

Blue states would have a major tool to push back. Whether they would use it is less clear.

States have the power to set separate rules for state and local elections and to apply federal restrictions only on residents voting in federal races, according to interviews with more than a dozen election experts, officials and lawmakers. Operating two distinct election systems, a process called bifurcation, would give states more freedom over who can vote in races for governor, state legislature and other down-ballot contests.

Bifurcation would ensure that individuals like Fish could still cast a ballot in some contests, even if they couldn’t vote for members of Congress or president.

“It’s very strange and surreal,” Fish told Stateline about a potential national requirement during an interview on Tuesday in Ottawa, Kansas, where he works at a warehouse. Those looking back at his state, he said, will see “it did not work at all.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, states regulate the times, places and manner of federal elections, though Congress has the authority to override them. But Congress has far less authority over state and local elections.

Brandon Fincher, managing editor of the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice, said a national proof-of-citizenship requirement would likely generate interest in bifurcation. “I think it absolutely would,” said Fincher, who wrote a dissertation that found states are likely to adopt dual systems when their voter registration rules are threatened by federal mandates or court orders.

Bifurcation wouldn’t restrain Congress from imposing voting restrictions on federal elections. It also wouldn’t stop any changes Trump has threatened to make through executive order, but those would almost certainly face immediate challenges in federal courts. The president has no unilateral authority under the U.S. Constitution to direct how states run elections.

In the past 30 years, only a handful of states have tried a two-tier system, according to Fincher’s research. Costs and administrative barriers tend to discourage states from pursuing a dual system, election experts and officials said.

Kansas briefly had one more than a decade ago. It came amid legal fights over the state’s 2011 proof-of-citizenship law and allowed voters who signed a sworn statement that they were citizens, but didn’t provide documentation, to cast ballots for federal races but not in state and local elections.

Arizona is the only state that currently operates a two-tier system — requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in state and local races, but not in federal.

Still, the country is littered with current smaller-scale efforts and past examples where states operated multiple election systems.

More than 20 cities allow some form of noncitizen voting in local races, for example, even though only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, according to Immigrant Voting Rights, a site that tracks legal noncitizen voting. Before the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed universal suffrage to women, some states allowed women to vote in some contests but not all. And Maryland lawmakers are currently weighing a plan to bifurcate its elections for some absentee ballots.

Wren Orey, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project, said more proposals to bifurcate state and federal elections could follow any congressional action.

“We’re always going to see that any time there are major federal policy changes being considered that some states are going to consider, at the very least, a system where state and local elections don’t meet those requirements,” Orey said.

Maryland weighs ‘insurance policy’

In Maryland, state lawmakers are weighing bifurcating a small portion of their absentee ballots depending on the outcome of a looming U.S. Supreme Court case involving mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia offer so-called grace periods for ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day but arrive afterward, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Trump administration argues these ballots cannot be counted. A ruling in that case, expected later this year, will affect millions of Americans.

If the White House wins, twin bills being considered in Maryland’s House and Senate would direct election officials to tabulate all votes on those ballots except for federal offices.

Maryland state Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Democrat sponsoring one of the bills, called the legislation an “insurance policy.”

The sponsor of the Maryland House bill, Democratic state Del. Kris Fair, said lawmakers would have to wait and see on federal actions before deciding whether the bifurcation could be expanded to cover additional restrictions on voting, but he didn’t rule it out.

Fair said additional bifurcation would be a “complicated conversation.” But he added that Maryland legislators would always seek to reduce as many barriers to voting as possible while keeping elections safe and secure.

“Every time the federal government is acting, seeking to restrict access and seeking to disenfranchise voters, we are going to immediately look at the books and see how we can bring enfranchisement back to the largest number of Maryland voters that we can,” Fair said.

A national battle

Republicans face tremendous pressure from Trump, who has called for “nationalizing” elections, to act ahead of the midterms in November to decide control of Congress.

They say new nationwide election standards are needed to guard against voter fraud, though instances of fraud are very rare. Trump has long pushed the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen, and his administration has taken steps to keep attention focused on that race, including an FBI seizure of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, last month.

The SAVE America Act narrowly passed the U.S. House last week and has majority support in the Senate, but faces a likely filibuster that would take 60 votes to overcome — which it does not have. The measure would require the public to produce a U.S. passport or birth certificate in most cases to register to vote. It would take effect immediately if signed into law.

The Trump administration has cast anyone opposed to the legislation as motivated by a desire to cheat.

“They want illegal people and aliens in this country to be able to vote for them and to rob the United States citizens of their vote,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a news conference in Arizona last week.

US House approves bill mandating proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a written statement to Stateline that Trump is “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.”

Just a handful of years ago, some Republican legislators considered bifurcation in response to Democratic proposals during the Biden administration that sparked fears of a nationalized election system.

When a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 and 2022 tried to pass sweeping election legislation that included automatic voter registration, a conservative backlash led to the introduction of bills in some statehouses that sought to assert greater state authority over elections.

In 2023, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that since 2020, legislation had been offered in five states — Alaska, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Texas — that would have separated state and federal elections. One 2021 Alaska measure would have directed state officials to stop holding elections for president and Congress if new federal law created a significant conflict with Alaska regulations. No state moved forward with separating its elections.

“If the Federal Government nationalizes the election system, undermining the long tradition of mutual cooperation, or worse, the sovereign rights of a state to manage its internal election affairs, then Alaska should simply tell the federal government to run their own election, bifurcating the election process,” Mike Shower, a then-state GOP senator who sponsored the measure, wrote in a statement at the time.

Shower, now a candidate for lieutenant governor, didn’t respond to an interview request sent to his campaign.

Election officials predict complications

Whatever the motivation behind considering bifurcation, election officials and experts say the burden of running a dual system is high.

Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, called the scenario a “nightmare” for election administrators because they would have to implement state and federal requirements while paying for it all.

Jamie Shew, clerk of Douglas County, Kansas, an area that includes the sprawling University of Kansas campus, said an upcoming primary election there has about 113 ballot styles — variations of ballots that voters receive depending on where they live and what party they belong to. A bifurcated system would only increase that.

“It just adds this layer of administration and complication,” said Shew, a Democrat. “It’s one of those things that as an election administration keeps you awake, because do we have it right?”

Even setting aside bifurcation, enforcing a proof-of-citizenship requirement could be costly for election officials. Bob Page, the nonpartisan registrar of voters in Orange County, California — an area with about 3.2 million residents — estimates the additional cost in his jurisdiction could exceed $6 million a year.

Page told Stateline in an email that assuming each voter could be served in 10 minutes, his office would need 59 additional staff members. He emphasized that he takes no position on legislation and will implement any changes in the law.

In Douglas County, Shew said that as Congress has debated a proof-of-citizenship requirement, he’s heard from election officials around the country who want to know about Kansas’ experience. When the state law was in effect, Shew said, he hired two additional temporary staff members to help process voter registrations.

Despite serving a university community, Shew said many of the issues his office encountered involved older voters who couldn’t locate a birth certificate or had certificates with incorrect information. In one instance, a birth certificate for someone born at a house decades ago listed when a doctor showed up, but not the date of birth. In other cases, birth certificates spelled names incorrectly.

“There’s a lot of stuff we’re going to have to record,” Shew said of the proposed SAVE America Act requirements. “If you get 100 [voter] registrations in a day, I’m going to have to go back to bringing in temporary staff just to handle that amount of extra paperwork.”

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican running for governor, didn’t directly answer Stateline’s questions about whether he supports the SAVE America Act or has any concerns about the ability of election officials in the state to implement the measure if it becomes law. Schwab told The Associated Press in 2024 that Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship requirement “didn’t work out so well.”

In a short written statement to Stateline this week, Schwab noted only that Kansas has had a voter ID requirement — which is different from a proof-of-citizenship requirement — for more than a decade and that all states with one benefit.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican who championed the state’s proof-of-citizenship law while he was state secretary of state and personally defended it in court, didn’t answer questions from Stateline.

Fish, the Kansas resident who tried unsuccessfully to register to vote in 2014, said he eventually found his birth certificate in the back of a baby book, but not before it was too late for that election. A resident of Garnett, a city of about 3,200 people, Fish said he’s learned not to bring up the legal challenge often.

Many people don’t understand how it could happen to an average person, he said, adding they believe there must be a reason the person trying to register was at fault.

“It’s not really something you can change their minds on if they’re on that side,” Fish said.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House passed legislation Wednesday that would require the public to produce a passport or birth certificate in most cases to register to vote, less than a year out from November midterm elections.

The 218-213 vote split mostly along party lines, with one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, breaking with his party to support the measure. One Republican, North Carolina’s Greg Murphy, did not vote.

Republicans argued the bill, dubbed by House Republicans as the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” or the SAVE America Act, will prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal and rare.

The Senate is considering its own version of the bill.

The GOP’s championing of the bill follows President Donald Trump’s comments advocating to nationalize elections, a mid-decade campaign to redraw state congressional districts in Republicans’ favor and more than two dozen Department of Justice lawsuits demanding Democratic-led states turn over unredacted voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security.

The bill also includes a provision requiring each state to send an “official list of eligible voters for federal office” to Homeland Security to be run through the department’s database to identify any noncitizens.

‘Show your papers’

The legislation has attracted sharp criticism from Democrats and voting rights advocates as a “show your papers” law that will disenfranchise the roughly 146 million Americans who do not have a passport. 

They say it would also affect those without ready access to a birth certificate and married women whose last names do not match the name appearing on birth records.

If passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trump, the measure would take effect immediately.

“Republicans know that they cannot win on the merits, so rather than change their policies, they’re seeking to change the rules. John Lewis was not bludgeoned on a bridge in my hometown for the Republicans and Donald Trump to take these rules away from us,” said Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., invoking the late Democratic Rep. John Lewis, who was beaten in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, during a march for voting rights. 

“This is a blatant power grab, as Democrats will not stand for it,” Sewell, whose district includes Selma, said on the floor ahead of the vote.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the timing of the measure, if enacted, would cause “maximum chaos.”

“A change of this magnitude to our election system right before an election would be not only terrible in substance in that it would block Americans from voting, but would also be chaos-causing,” Morales-Doyle said. 

“It would change the rules that govern our elections and government registration right when that is happening at the highest rate. … There’s always a huge increase in registration in the run-up to an election.”

‘Daggum ID’

But Republicans argue the legislation provides “safeguards” to ensure only U.S. citizens vote, as Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said on the floor ahead of the vote.

“House Republicans and President Trump want to protect the ballot box and ensure integrity in our elections across this great country,” Burchett said.

“When you purchase a firearm, when you board a plane, when you open a bank account — if I put $100 in the bank and right then ask for $20 of it back, guess what: I gotta show a daggum ID,” Burchett continued.

Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said Democrats’ arguments against the bill amounted to “hyperbole.”

“We should be checking and cleaning up the voter rolls and removing individuals who are not eligible to vote, because every citizen deserves the right to vote,” he said.

Claims of noncitizen voting in federal elections represent “tiny fractions of voters,” according to a July 2025 analysis from The Center for Election Innovation and Research. The report was updated this month.

Murkowski not on board

The Senate version, sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, may face stronger headwinds.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, issued a statement on social media Tuesday saying she won’t support the legislation.

“Not only does the U.S. Constitution clearly provide states the authority to regulate the ‘times, places, and manner’ of holding federal elections, but one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington, D.C., seldom work in places like Alaska,” Murkowski wrote, adding that changing procedures so close to the midterms would “negatively impact election integrity.”

FBI agents load boxes of election documents onto trucks at an elections warehouse in Fulton County, Ga. State and local election officials are bracing for the prospect of federal action after President Donald Trump’s call to nationalize elections. (Photo by Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder)

President Donald Trump’s calls this week to “nationalize” elections capped a year of efforts by his administration to exercise authority over state-run elections. The demands now have some state and local election officials fearing — and preparing for — a tumultuous year ahead.

“I don’t think we can put anything past this administration,” Oregon Democratic Secretary of State Tobias Read told Stateline in an interview. “I think they’re increasingly desperate, increasingly scared about what’s going to happen when they are held accountable by American voters. So we have to be prepared for everything.”

Ever since Trump signed an executive order last March that attempted to impose a requirement that voters prove their citizenship in federal elections, the federal government has engaged in a wide-ranging effort to influence how elections are run. Under the U.S. Constitution, that responsibility belongs to the states.

Then came Trump’s remarks on a podcast Monday that Republicans should nationalize elections and take over voting in at least 15 places, though he didn’t specify where. In the Oval Office the next day, the president reaffirmed his view that states are “agents” of the federal government in elections.

“I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday, despite the Constitution’s clear delegation of that job to states.

Across the country, election officials are watching recent developments and, in some instances, grappling with how the Trump administration’s moves could affect their preparations for November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress. Local election officials say they are considering how they would respond to the presence of federal law enforcement near polling places and what steps they need to take to ensure voting proceeds smoothly.

Several Democratic election officials, and some Republicans, have spoken out. Placing voting under control of the federal government would represent a fundamental violation of the Constitution, they note.

The U.S. Constitution authorizes states to set the time, place and manner of elections for Congress but also allows Congress to change those regulations. The elections themselves are run by the states.

“Oh, hell no,” Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said in a video statement posted to social media about federalizing elections. Bellows, who is running for governor, said she would mail the White House a pocket Constitution, “because it seems they’ve lost their copy.”

The U.S. Department of Justice already has sued 24 states and the District of Columbia to obtain unredacted voter rolls that include sensitive personal information that it says is needed to search for noncitizen voters. The Department of Homeland Security wants states to run their voter rolls through a powerful citizenship verification tool. Those opposed to the demand say sharing the data risks the privacy of millions of voters. Many fear the administration could use the information to disqualify eligible voters, challenge the legitimacy of a victory in a closely contested midterm election, or use the information to target political enemies.

In recent weeks, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi linked the presence of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in part to Minnesota’s refusal to turn over its voter rolls. And the FBI seized ballots from an elections warehouse Fulton County, Georgia — a state that was a central focus of Trump’s push to overturn his 2020 election loss.

“I think it does affect our planning as far as, what if there is some sort of federal law enforcement presence on Election Day or before or after? So that definitely factors into our planning,” said Scott McDonell, the Democratic clerk in Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes Madison.

Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat running for secretary of state, said she and other election administrators conduct tabletop exercises and keep emergency plans for numerous scenarios. Those used to focus on floods, power outages and cyberattacks.

“Now, unfortunately, it’s turning into the president of the United States meddling in elections,” Byrum said. “We will be prepared. Voters will hopefully not see anything different at their polling locations. … But we need to be diligent.”

Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, said election officials and their lawyers need to study up on laws and regulations, including chain-of-custody requirements for ballots.

David Becker, director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which operates the Election Official Legal Defense Network, said more than 10,000 lawyers have been recruited who are ready to provide pro bono legal assistance or advice to election officials.

Trump doubles down on calling for the feds to take over state elections

When Stateline asked Read whether he anticipates Oregon facing federal pressure over its voter rolls, the secretary of state said he was set to meet this week with county clerks in the Portland metro area “to talk about that very question.” Read’s office later confirmed the meeting took place.

Oregon’s largest city, Portland, has been a focus of the Trump administration. Last year, Trump deployed federalized Oregon National Guard members to the city after protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. And federal agents last month shot two people in a hospital parking lot. Portland is a self-described sanctuary city that does not aid the federal government in immigration enforcement.

The concern in Oregon comes after Bondi on Jan. 24 sent a letter to Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz after federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in separate shootings in Minneapolis that were captured on video.

Bondi’s letter outlined three “common sense solutions” that would help end the “chaos” in Minnesota, she wrote. One of those solutions called for the state to provide the Justice Department with its full, unredacted voter rolls.

Minnesota Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon has called Bondi’s letter an “outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota” into handing over the data. Simon hasn’t provided the voter list, but White House border czar Tom Homan is pulling 700 immigration agents from Minnesota amid outrage over their presence. Roughly 2,300 agents will remain in the state.

In North Carolina, Durham County Director of Elections Derek Bowens called Trump’s rhetoric and recent federal actions concerning. Bowens, a nonpartisan official appointed by the Durham County Board of Elections, said that as long as the rule of law persists, a “constitutional guard” will protect election administration.

Still, Bowens, who oversees elections in a largely Democratic area in a presidential swing state, said he and other local officials are preparing to prevent potential “intrusion” into the process.

“I’m not at liberty to divulge what that would be in terms of security protocols, but that’s definitely in the forefronts of our minds,” Bowens said in an interview, adding that he would be working with local emergency services officials “to make sure we’re positioned to ensure everyone that is eligible has unfettered access to the ballot box.”

Trump wants federal control

Trump appears to be crossing a line from urging Congress to set additional election requirements into wanting the federal government’s hands on states’ election administration infrastructure, said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Elections Research Center at the university.

“That would be brand new,” Burden said.

After Trump called for nationalizing elections during Monday’s appearance on the podcast of Dan Bongino, a right-wing media personality who was previously a top FBI official, the White House said Tuesday that the president had been referring to legislation in Congress that would require individuals to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. The bill has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate.

But Trump late Tuesday doubled down on his original comments during an unrelated bill-signing ceremony in the Oval Office. He suggested the federal government should take a role in vote counting.

“The federal government should get involved,” Trump said. “These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Even before Trump’s nationalization comments, Democratic state chief election officials and some Republicans had refused to turn over copies of voter rolls containing driver’s license numbers, date of birth and full or partial Social Security numbers after the Justice Department began demanding the data last spring.

Federal judges in California and Oregon have ruled those states don’t have to provide the data; numerous other lawsuits against other states are ongoing.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Trump-supporting Republican who campaigned for office on calls to hand-count ballots, told a Missouri House committee on Tuesday that he wouldn’t provide the state’s full voter list without a court order. He said his office had only shared a public version of the voter rolls; Missouri hasn’t been sued by the Justice Department.

The Trump administration has previously confirmed it is sharing records with Homeland Security, which operates an online program that it uses to verify citizenship. The Justice Department has also offered some states a confidential agreement to search their voter lists.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a statement to Stateline.

“The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

But U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee, wrote in a Jan. 15 decision that the voter roll demands risk a chilling effect on Americans who may opt not to register to vote over concerns about how their information could be used. He dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking California’s voter rolls.

“The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left. The case before the Court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans,” Carter wrote in a 33-page decision.

Some Republicans oppose nationalization

Amid Trump’s call for nationalizing elections, some Republican election officials have broken with the president even as they have avoided criticizing him directly. State control has long been a central tenant of conservatism, though Trump has challenged elements of Republican orthodoxy over the past decade.

Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, told state lawmakers on Tuesday, “I personally don’t believe we should nationalize elections.”

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a news release on Monday urged lawmakers to focus on strengthening state administration of elections. He said that was better than “moving to federalize a core function of state government.”

Raffensperger, who is running for governor this year, was famously targeted by Trump following the 2020 election to overturn his loss in Georgia. In a phone call, Trump told Raffensperger he wanted to “find 11,780 votes” — the size of his loss in the state. Raffensperger refused to aid Trump.

Five years later, Raffensperger now faces pressure from Georgia state lawmakers to provide the state’s unredacted voter list to the Justice Department. The Georgia Senate on Monday passed a resolution calling on the secretary of state to fully comply with the department’s request.

Georgia Republican state Sen. Randy Robertson, the resolution’s lead sponsor, said during a state Senate committee hearing last month that federal law supersedes limits on data sharing in Georgia law. He didn’t respond to an interview request.

In a statement to Stateline, Raffensperger said that state law is “very clear” that officials aren’t allowed to turn over the information. “I will always follow the law and the Constitution,” Raffensperger wrote.

The Georgia Senate vote came less than a week after the FBI searched the Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots. Fulton County, which includes much of the Atlanta metro area, was where Trump was indicted on charges of conspiracy and racketeering related to his efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election. The case was dismissed last year.

The Justice Department didn’t answer a question from Stateline about whether it plans to seek search warrants for other election offices.

On Wednesday, Fulton County filed a motion in federal court demanding the return of the seized ballots and other materials, Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said at a news conference. The motion also asks for the unsealing of the affidavit used by the FBI to support its search warrant application.

“We will fight using all resources against those who seek to take over our elections,” Pitts said. “Our Constitution itself is at stake in this fight.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump gives a speech at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump restated a call Tuesday for federal control over election administration across the country, undermining the structure outlined in the Constitution that empowers states to run elections.

For the second time in as many days, Trump indicated he wanted the federal government more involved in elections. The issue renews concerns over Trump’s expansion of presidential power, which critics of his second presidency have labeled authoritarian.

Speaking after a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office and surrounded by Republican leaders in Congress, he responded to a question about earlier comments on “nationalizing” election administration by indicating the lawmakers standing behind him should “do something about it.” 

“I want to see elections be honest,” he said. “If you think about it, the state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”

Trump repeated debunked claims that he lost the 2020 presidential election only because of election fraud, especially in large Democrat-leaning cities including Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit.

“The federal government should not allow that,” he said. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

The comments marked the second time in as many days that Trump has floated a federal takeover of election infrastructure and came after Republican leaders in Congress and the White House press secretary had downplayed his earlier remarks.

In a podcast interview released Monday, Trump said his party should “nationalize” elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Afternoon walkback

Reporters asked U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune at press availabilities Tuesday about Trump’s initial comments. 

Both avoided endorsing the view and sought to tie them to GOP legislation that would create a nationwide requirement that voters show proof of citizenship.

“We have thoughtful debate about our election system every election cycle and sometimes in between,” Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said. “We know it’s in our system: The states have been in charge of administering their elections. What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections. We need constant improvement on that front.”

“I think the president has clarified what he meant by that, and that is that he supports the SAVE Act,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said earlier Tuesday. “There are other views, probably, when it comes to nationalizing or federalizing elections, but I think at least on that narrow issue, which is what the SAVE Act gets at, I think that’s what the president was addressing.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also endorsed the GOP elections bill and said states and cities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections created a system that was rife with fraud. Reports of election fraud are exceedingly rare.

“There are millions of people who have questions about that, as does the president,” she said. “He wants to make it right and the SAVE Act is the solution.”

But Trump on Tuesday evening, with Johnson among those standing behind him, seemed to indicate a broader desire for the federal government to be directly involved with election administration.

2020 election history

Trump has a charged history with claims around election integrity.

His persistent lie that he won the 2020 election, despite dozens of court cases that showed no determinative fraud, sparked the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as his supporters sought to reverse the election results.

He has continued to make the claim since returning to office and spoke by phone with FBI agents who seized voting machines in Fulton County, Georgia, according to New York Times reporting, raising questions about his use of law enforcement to reinforce his political power.

Trump’s opponents, some of whom have said he is sliding toward authoritarianism in his second term, quickly rebuked his recent comments.

“Donald Trump called for Republican officials to ‘take over’ voting procedures in 15 states,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, wrote on social media. “People of all political parties need to be able to stand up and say this can’t happen.”

Walter Olson, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a statement that federalization of elections would be a bad idea on the merits, but Trump’s history raised additional concern and called for Americans to be “vigilant against any repeated such attempt before, during or after the approaching midterms.”

“This trial balloon for a federal takeover is not coming from any ordinary official,” Olson said. “It is coming from a man who already once tried to overturn a free and fair election because it went against him, employing a firehose of lies and meritless legal theories, and who repeatedly pressed his underlings, many of whom in those days were willing to say ‘no’ about schemes such as sending in federal troops to seize voting machines.”