Millions of women could face new challenges to voting under President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship before casting a ballot.

The federal legislation would mandate that most Americans show a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. But people with names that don’t match their birth certificate in some instances could have to produce additional documents like a marriage certificate or divorce decree linking their past and current identities.

The proposal holds potentially outsized consequences for millions of married and divorced women, transgender individuals and others who have changed their names. 

As many as 69 million American women have birth certificates that don’t match their current name, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress. 

“The fact that the majority of women upon marriage do change their name already means that this is going to be completely unequal in how the law is applied,” said Letitia Harmon, senior director of policy and research at Florida Rising, a racial and economic justice nonprofit.

Harmon, 43, has personal experience with the issue because of state proof-of-citizenship laws, which have become more common in recent years. 

The Florida resident used to live in Kansas, which required individuals to show documents like a birth certificate or passport to register to vote until federal courts struck down the law as unconstitutional. Ahead of the 2014 election, Harmon was unable to locate her birth certificate before the registration deadline and couldn’t vote.

More recently, Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota and Utah have all enacted proof-of-citizenship measures this year, in addition to Wyoming in 2025. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Florida SAVE Act last week.

A dozen years later, Harmon worries she could again face additional hurdles to voting — this time because of multiple name changes. Harmon, who changed her name when she married but later divorced and changed it back, voiced concern that if election officials ever check her registration, it will be flagged.

“It’s heartbreaking and it’s infuriating. It feels like we’re going backwards,” Harmon said.

Debate in D.C.

In Washington, the U.S. Senate has been debating the SAVE America Act, Trump’s signature elections initiative, after a version of the legislation passed the House. The bill doesn’t appear to have enough support to survive a filibuster, but Trump and his allies have pressured senators to end the filibuster to pass it before the midterm elections.

Supporters of the bill describe it as an election integrity measure and say it’s necessary to prevent noncitizen voting, though studies have shown that’s extremely rare. The measure reflects a long-running effort by Trump to assert more federal control over elections that includes a campaign by the Department of Justice to obtain sensitive state voter data and an executive order signed last week restricting mail-in voting.

Opponents condemn the legislation as unneeded and poorly drafted. If enacted, the bill would take immediate effect, throwing the election process into chaos in a midterm election year as millions of people registering to vote attempt to prove their citizenship. The new requirements would risk disenfranchising American voters struggling to obtain the documents they need in time.

Disproportionate effect on married women

Critics have especially focused on the disproportionate effect the legislation could have on women. Eighty-four percent of women in opposite-sex marriages take either their husband’s last name or hyphenate their name, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. By contrast, less than 6% of men took their wife’s last name or hyphenated their name.

“Given that 85% of American women change their name when they get married, the impact on women is going to be huge and it’s going to be very problematic,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said in a February interview.

The House-passed version of the bill says that when individuals applying to register have names that don’t match the name on their proof-of-citizenship documents, they could provide “additional documentation as necessary to establish that the name on the documentation is a previous name of the applicant” or sign an affidavit affirming that the name on the documents is their previous name.

According to the bill, each state would establish a process to carry out this provision, in line with guidance from the federal Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan independent commission that aids election officials.

Affidavit provision unclear

Some election and legal experts have said the affidavit provision is unclear. It comes immediately before another provision that allows individuals without proof-of-citizenship documentation to register if they sign an attestation that they are a citizen and an election official signs an affidavit saying the person has sufficiently established citizenship. The Election Assistance Commission would create a uniform affidavit for use in that situation.

“Who knows what sort of process they’ll say,” said Alison Gill, director of nominations and democracy at the National Women’s Law Center, a progressive legal advocacy group. “So there is language there, but it’s still very vague and conflictual.”

Because states would be responsible for setting procedures to vet those with different names on their documents, Gill said some states would probably try to make the process easier than others. But election officials would likely err on the side of strict enforcement because they could be prosecuted for registering individuals who don’t provide citizenship documents.

“Ultimately, this puts the burden on election officials, who face criminal and civil liability under the bill, potentially to decide whether to risk registering a person with mismatching documents,” Gill said.

‘Frankly insulting’

White House officials and some congressional Republicans have denied that individuals who change their name would face greater difficulty registering to vote. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in March that there was “zero validity” to claims that the legislation would stop women from voting or make it harder for them to vote.

Married women who have changed their name and are already registered to vote would be unaffected by the legislation, Leavitt said. She added that for the “small fraction” of individuals who go on to change their name or their address, they would have to go through their state’s process to update their documentation.

“I think it’s frankly insulting that the Democrats are saying that there are certain groups of people in this country who aren’t smart enough to update their documentation to allow them to vote,” Leavitt said.

But Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has raised concerns about how the SAVE America Act would affect married women. Murkowski, who opposes the bill, said in a floor speech that an estimated 155,000 female citizens in Alaska age 15 and older have names that don’t match their birth certificates.

“Again, is it impossible? No,” Murkowski said. “Is it going to be really challenging? Absolutely, yes.”

Lawsuits ensured

The SAVE America Act would almost certainly face legal challenges if it became law and the Supreme Court would come under immense pressure to weigh in because of the sweeping, nationwide changes in the legislation.

Some federal courts have ruled against proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirements. In 2020, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Kansas’ law, finding that it violated federal voting laws as well as the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court at the time declined to take the Kansas case.

The provisions on name changes alone could face their own legal challenges. 

Tracy Thomas, a constitutional law professor at the University of Akron School of Law in Ohio, said opponents could argue the bill’s impact on people who change their name amounts to voting discrimination in violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

Courts have affirmed some election restrictions, like requirements to show a photo ID at the polls, as acceptable rules that don’t overly burden voters. However, Thomas suggested the SAVE America Act may go too far if it delays people from registering, requires multiple steps and forces them to pay for needed documents.

“That starts to sound like more than minimal inconvenience,” Thomas said.

Before Wyoming elections, the state’s League of Women Voters tries to get voter registration information into the hands of residents at events and gatherings. But under state law, League volunteers can’t sign up voters themselves — only local election officials can do that.

“It’s been tough,” said Linda Barton, president of the League of Women Voters of Wyoming. She added that her group does its best to offer registration information. “We provide a lot of printed literature that we hand out all over the state.”

Congress may take Wyoming’s approach nationwide.

The SAVE America Act would effectively ban voter registration drives, a mainstay of college campuses and neighborhood events. 

The U.S. Senate began debating a version of President Donald Trump’s signature elections measure last month, after the House passed it in February. The legislation would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot. It would also require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

Trump and Republican members of Congress have cast the proposal as necessary to secure elections and crack down on noncitizen voters ahead of the midterms. Democrats and other critics warn it risks disenfranchising wide swaths of Americans. Studies have shown noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

In many states, civic groups have long provided applications to would-be voters that they can quickly fill out. During the 2024 election cycle, voter registration drives accounted for 3.7% of registrations, according to survey data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. While a small percentage, the figure still represents 2.1 million Americans.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on voter registration drives as of November 2024, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

Bill would end registration drives nationwide

Every form of voter registration drive would effectively end under the SAVE America Act as currently drafted in the Senate, said Brian Miller, executive director of NonprofitVOTE, which aids nonprofit organizations in helping individuals vote and participate in the democratic process. Community-based groups, universities, food pantries and others who help register voters would all be affected.

“That’s the high school civics teacher who works with his graduating class … gone, they can’t do that anymore,” Miller said.

NonprofitVOTE, working with 120 organizations across nine states, engaged 60,000 voters during the 2022 midterm cycle, according to a report by the group. It found that individuals reached by nonprofits were 10 percentage points more likely to cast a ballot than comparable registered voters.

The effect was more pronounced among younger voters. Those ages 18 to 24 who were engaged by nonprofit groups were 12 percentage points more likely to cast a ballot than comparable registered voters.

Hispanic Federation, a nationwide Hispanic and Latino advocacy group, says it has registered 160,000 voters since 2016. Frederick Vélez III Burgos, the federation’s senior director for communications and community outreach, said the organization works to register voters because of language and cultural barriers, work schedules and other factors that make the process challenging.

“There’s just a group of people and communities that is just very difficult to get registered through normal means,” Burgos said.

Top Trump priority

Trump has made clear the SAVE America Act is his top legislative priority and he has urged Congress to pass the measure before moving to other business. While Republicans control both chambers of Congress, support for the proposal falls short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate.

“The SAVE Act would gut tried-and-true methods of voter registration, including registration by mail and registering online,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said earlier this year.

Still, Senate Republican leaders in March kicked off an extended, wide-ranging debate over the bill. It remains unclear when the debate will end. Congress is scheduled to be in recess until mid-April.

GOP proponents have dismissed concerns that the legislation would make registering to vote and casting a ballot difficult. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said on the Senate floor that the bill offers multiple ways to prove citizenship and “gives states the flexibility to create other pathways to show proof of citizenship.”

Grassley noted that his mother was one of the first women to cast a ballot after ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote.

“The SAVE America Act doesn’t infringe on these hard-fought voting rights. It would preserve the integrity of every vote cast in a federal election,” Grassley said.

Hard-to-reach voters

Third-party voter registration drives date back to voter education and registration efforts by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, according to Joshua Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor who specializes in voting rights and election law. The association eventually morphed into the League of Women Voters, which helped spearhead registration efforts following the 19th Amendment.

Voter registration drives typically aid voters who may not otherwise have opportunities to register, Douglas wrote in an email to States Newsroom. They may not have a driver’s license or may not be thinking about registering.

“There is a long history of civic organizations engaged in voter registration drives and this legislation would make that work harder,” Douglas wrote.

Tom Lopach, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Voter Participation Center, an organization that works to register voters from underrepresented populations, said he fears some members of Congress haven’t fully read the bill or digested how it would affect voting. 

Since VPC was founded in 2003, it has helped register 7 million voters, Lopach said.

“And that’s just us,” he said. “When you think about the League of Women Voters, when you think about in-person voter registration drives happening in a grocery store parking lot, or knocking doors in a neighborhood, you would have tens of millions of Americans not registered and then not voting.”

States trending toward more restrictions

Even if the SAVE America Act doesn’t become law, some states have taken steps to make voter registration drives more difficult. 

The Center for Public Integrity and NPR found in 2024 that at least six states had passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives following the 2020 election. Some of the bills imposed massive fines for violations or barred noncitizens from participating.

As recently as March, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it would require groups conducting voter registration drives to print their own registration forms. The board cited significant costs, after it provided nearly 1.3 million applications to organizations and government agencies in 2024 at a cost of more than $269,000.

“Nothing about this temporary tightening of our practice surrounding voter registration drives changes the fact that any North Carolina citizen who wants a voter registration application will always be able to get one simply by contacting their county board of elections or the State Board,” Sam Hayes, the board’s executive director, told NC Newsline.

Courts have blocked some state-level restrictions. A federal court prohibited Kansas from enforcing a 2021 law that barred out-of-state organizations from distributing advance mail ballot applications to voters and prohibited applications that contained personalized voter information. Kansas has appealed the decision.

The Missouri Supreme Court last week ruled against a state law that prohibited groups like the League of Women Voters from using paid workers in voter registration drives. The state’s high court also struck down requirements that individuals who solicit more than 10 registration applications must register with the state and be Missouri voters. The law had also prohibited encouraging someone to obtain an absentee ballot.

Kay Park, president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri, called the restrictions “ridiculous” and said that while they were in effect the organization did nothing with absentee ballots — such as suggesting an absentee ballot could be an option for someone with a disability, for instance.

The League of Women Voters of Missouri holds voter registration drives in high schools, Park said. While Missouri residents must be 18 to vote, they can register once they’re 17 ½ years old. The SAVE America Act would effectively end those drives.

If the legislation becomes law, Park said the Missouri league would likely focus more of its efforts on helping individuals obtain identification documents and birth certifications — something it’s already trying to do.

“It just puts another cog in the wheel,” Park said.

Wyoming model

In Wyoming, Barton and her fellow League of Women Voters members are already grappling with a state-level proof-of-citizenship voter registration law passed last year, regardless of whether Congress passes the SAVE America Act.

Residents who want to register to vote must visit a county clerk’s office and bring a valid passport or birth certificate. Wyoming also accepts REAL ID-compliant driver’s licenses and tribal IDs, as long as they do not indicate the individual is a noncitizen, and a few other documents, such as a naturalization certificate. Individuals may register by mail but must include copies of their documents along with a notarized application.

The new state requirements were championed by Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who is running for the state’s U.S. House seat.

“As the chief election official of Wyoming that has experience with these common sense election integrity measures, I can tell you that the SAVE America Act will be easy for states to implement,” Gray wrote in a March 17 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican.

Gray didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Barton said without the option to hold voter registration drives, going to events and speaking to clubs and organizations like Rotary are imperative.

“I just think that the only other choice is to be out there, communicating as much as possible,” she said.

President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Tuesday that attempts to restrict mail-in voting, a White House priority certain to face significant legal challenges.

The order directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security along with the Social Security Administration to compile a list of voting-age American citizens in each state and share it with state election officials. The order also requires the U.S. Postal Service to only send and receive ballots that include tracking barcodes.

Trump’s order represents a major escalation in his effort to assert presidential control over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are administered by the states. Trump last year attempted to unilaterally impose a proof of citizenship requirement to vote in federal elections in an executive order that was blocked in federal court.

The move also reflects a long-held focus by Trump and his allies on noncitizen voters. Studies have shown noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

“I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said.

National database of adult citizens

Homeland Security operates the SAVE system, a powerful computer program that can verify citizenship. 

DHS has previously invited states to run their voter rolls through SAVE, which flags voters as potential noncitizens. Some election officials criticize the system, saying it wrongly identifies U.S. citizens as possibly ineligible.

The U.S. Department of Justice as recently as last week denied any efforts to create a national voter registration list. While the executive order does not explicitly mandate the creation of a voter list, it essentially marks an effort by the White House to create a national database of adult U.S. citizens.

The order requires Homeland Security to enable states to routinely supplement or suggest changes to each state’s citizenship list. Federal officials would also be required to allow individuals to access their own records and update or correct them ahead of elections.

Under the executive order, the postmaster general must propose rules to require all outbound ballot mail to be sent in an envelope that includes a barcode for tracking. The order also requires that states must inform the U.S. Postal Service at least 90 days before federal elections whether they intend to allow ballots to be sent through the mail.

“Instead of focusing on lowering the cost of energy, groceries, and health care, Donald Trump is desperately attempting to take over and rig our elections and avoid accountability in November,” U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said in a statement shortly after Trump announced the order. “This executive order is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power.”

SAVE America Act

Trump has pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require individuals to produce documents, such as a passport or birth certificate, proving their citizenship in order to register to vote. The U.S. Senate is debating the bill, but it appears unlikely to have enough support to overcome a filibuster.

Trump has repeatedly asked Republicans to add three provisions to the bill, including restrictions on mail-in voting, with exceptions for members of the military, people who are ill and those on vacation. 

The president has also previously promised to advance voting restrictions, with or without Congress. Earlier this month, Trump voted by mail in Florida.

The executive order directs the Justice Department and other federal agencies to withhold federal funds from non-compliant states and localities “where such withholding is authorized by law.” 

Tuesday’s order is certain to face legal challenges. The Constitution gives Congress — not the president by executive order — the power to override state election regulations.

Marc Elias, a prominent voting rights litigator, promised to fight the executive order.

“If Trump signs an unconstitutional Executive Order to take over voting, we will sue,” Elias wrote on social media. “I don’t bluff and I usually win.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters praised the order, saying Trump was restoring voter confidence. “Protecting America’s ballot box isn’t optional – it’s the foundation of our republic,” Grunters said.

DOJ lawsuits against states

The Justice Department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia for copies of their voter rolls that contain sensitive personal information on voters, such as driver’s licenses and partial Social Security numbers. About a dozen states have voluntarily provided the data, but most are fighting the demands in court.

Three federal judges have so far ruled against the Justice Department. The administration is appealing and in court documents has argued that swift court decisions are necessary to ensure the security and fairness of the midterms.

The Trump administration has said the data is necessary to verify only citizens are registered to vote. Last week, a Justice Department lawyer confirmed in court that voter data would be shared with Homeland Security.

“Some may freak out about this, but honestly, this is hilarious,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section attorney, wrote on social media about the Trump order. 

“It’s clearly unconstitutional, will be blocked immediately, and the only thing it will accomplish is to make liberal lawyers wealthier. He might as well sign an EO banning gravity.”

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who wants to ban mail-in voting, said he had the right to vote by mail-in ballot in Florida’s special election Tuesday “because I’m president of the United States.”

The president’s statement at his Cabinet meeting Thursday comes as he aggressively pushes U.S. Senate Republicans to break the long-standing filibuster to pass a restrictive voting bill ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

The legislation, which would require a birth certificate and other documentation for voter registration, also would federally prohibit universal voting by mail without special approval, according to the Brennan Center and other sources.

“Because I’m president of the United States, and because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida because I felt I should be here instead of being in the beautiful sunshine,” Trump told reporters at the White House. 

“We have exceptions for mail in ballots. You do know that, right?” he said to the reporter who asked about his mail-in ballot. “So if you’re away, we have an exception. If you’re in the military, we have an exception. If you’re on a business trip, we have an exception. If you’re disabled, we have an exception. And if you’re ill, if you’re not feeling good. So I was away mostly in Washington, D.C., so I used a mail-in ballot.”

The president regularly travels on Air Force One between the nation’s capital and Florida, including taking a trip to his Palm Beach home this past weekend.

The White House declined to comment on whether someone other than the president requested, picked up and dropped off or mailed the president’s mail-in ballot. 

Florida election law states that only a person’s immediate family member or legal guardian can do so.

“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud. As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a written statement.

Trump’s statement also was made three days after conservative Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical that federal law allows states to accept mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but not received until after polls close, during a five-day grace period. While the case was out of Mississippi, 14 states — both red and blue — have similar laws.

2020 election refrain

Discrediting mail-in voting has been a common refrain of Trump’s since the 2020 presidential election, which he lost but still falsely claims he won.

Roughly 30% of voters cast mail-in ballots in the 2024 election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Eight states and Washington, D.C., allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They are: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.

Nebraska and North Dakota permit counties to opt into conducting elections via mail.

Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico allow mostly mail elections for certain small jurisdictions. A handful of other states permit mail voting for local elections.

SAVE America Act and filibuster

Writing on his social media platform Thursday morning, Trump said: “When is ‘enough, enough’ for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!! President DJT”

Trump complicated negotiations Monday when he said at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, that he would not approve a deal to end the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, ongoing since mid-February, unless senators could find a way to also pass his voting bill, dubbed the SAVE America Act.

The filibuster requires nearly all legislation to receive 60 votes to advance to passage in the Senate. With all Democrats against the legislation, the bill would not garner enough support in the upper chamber, which is split 53-47.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate was unable to agree Thursday whether to require photo identification to vote in federal elections, as the chamber debated a larger bill that would make several changes to how Americans register and cast ballots. 

The 53-47 procedural vote rejected an amendment from Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted to the SAVE America Act, which President Donald Trump and some GOP lawmakers believe is an essential piece of legislation, but Democrats say will make it more difficult for Americans to vote. 

The bill already included a section that is very similar to the amendment, but the vote gave Republicans the opportunity to put Democrats on the record about whether they supported voter ID to cast a ballot. 

California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla urged lawmakers to oppose the amendment, saying the vote was an indication of “showmanship and theatrics” from Republicans.

Padilla said the effort would have prevented people from using student IDs or tribal IDs that don’t have an expiration date from participating “in our democracy even though you are eligible.”

The photo ID requirement to cast a ballot, he said, would also add an “additional and unnecessary obstacle” to the tens of millions of Americans who vote by mail. 

“In the 2024 election, 48 million voters chose to vote by mail,” he said. “And in case you missed the breaking news a couple days ago, President Trump once again voted by mail in the special election in Florida. So what is it, good enough for the president but not good enough for the rest of us? Secure enough for the president but not secure enough for the American people?”

Republicans defend photo ID

Husted said during floor debate on the proposal that his amendment is “clean, simple, straightforward.”

“States across our country have shown that you can simultaneously make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said. “Georgia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, all along with my home state of Ohio, all have photo ID requirements, just to name a few.”

Husted said it’s “common sense” for Americans to prove who they are when they vote. 

“Americans are required to show a photo ID when they rent a car, when they start a job, when they board a plane. This is something that people do every single day,” he said. 

New rules for mail-in ballots

The amendment would have required anyone voting in person to provide election workers with a valid photo identification, which would include a driver’s license, state-issued identification card, U.S. passport, military ID card issued by either the Defense Department or the Department of Veterans Affairs, or a tribal identification card that has an expiration date. 

Americans submitting a mail-in ballot would need to send a copy of their photo identification. If for some reason a voter was unable to do that, they could submit the last four digits of their Social Security number along with an affidavit that they couldn’t provide a copy of their ID.

The provision would have requested state or local election officials “to the extent practicable” ensure people have access to a digital scanner and printer to copy their photo IDs for their mail-in ballots. 

State election officials would have been required to notify people of the new photo ID requirement to cast a ballot when they registered to vote. 

The bill itself, which holds several other provisions, has no chance of advancing in the Senate amid Democratic opposition. Major legislation cannot move forward without the support of at least 60 senators, a procedural step known as the legislative filibuster. 

Republicans earlier this week floated the possibility of moving pieces of the package through the complicated budget reconciliation process, though several GOP senators conceded it will be difficult to move a policy proposal through a pathway designed for changes to federal tax, spending and debt limit issues. 

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans on Tuesday were waiting to hear back from Democrats after they sent them a new offer to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which has been shut down since mid-February. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the proposal would fund many of the agencies within DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard, but wouldn’t provide new spending for some immigration enforcement and deportation activities. 

Those programs, mostly run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, received tens of billions of dollars in Republicans’ 2025 “big, beautiful” law, largely exempting those federal workers from the shutdowns.

Thune said the offer currently on the table would leave the door open to the House and Senate moving another budget reconciliation bill through that complicated process to provide additional funding for immigration and deportation programs.

The special legislative pathway would allow GOP leaders to move a bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote as long as they adhere to its rules. That would skirt the need for Democratic votes to get beyond the 60-vote legislative filibuster that applies to other bills. 

Pressure for a bipartisan deal to fund DHS mounted in recent days after security lines at airports throughout the country ballooned into multi-hour waits, leading passengers to miss their flights and face expensive rebooking fees. Union leaders on Tuesday demanded lawmakers reach a deal to fund the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of DHS.

SAVE Act as well

A possible reconciliation package, Thune said, could include elements of the SAVE America Act, an elections bill backed by President Donald Trump that remains stalled in the Senate amid Democratic opposition.

“This is a really good outcome, where we’ve moved the Democrats a long way in our direction,” Thune said. “And I think also an understanding that reconciliation could be a possibility in terms of additional funding and for perhaps addressing the SAVE America Act.”

Thune said the DHS spending bill wouldn’t include any of the overhauls to immigration enforcement that Democrats have advocated for since federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.  

“What was pretty clear is that they didn’t want funding,” he said. “So if you’re not going to have funding, I don’t know how all of a sudden now you can demand reforms, because I think for them, that was the issue.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during an afternoon press conference Democrats would prepare a counteroffer that would include changes to how ICE functions. 

“This does not have any reforms in ICE. But negotiations are ongoing and they’ve sent us an offer and we’ll be sending them an offer back,” the New York Democrat said. “And I can assure you it will contain significant reform in it.”

Schumer outlined what he described as “common sense” changes to immigration enforcement activities in late January after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Dems stick to immigration reforms

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said she will continue to press for “modest reforms” to immigration activities during negotiations over the DHS spending bill.  

“If we are talking about funding any part of ICE or CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that,” she said. 

Murray later added that negotiators “have made some progress and the White House has already agreed to some steps” but that the entire point is that “reforms must make it into law.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the Trump administration has “created this problem in which it’s really hard to address an immigration enforcement operation that’s out of control because it is funded out of almost every part of the DHS budget.”

Murphy said his sense is that Democrats are “still firm on our insistence that we’re not going to fund an immigration enforcement operation without reform.”

Republicans argue for deal

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford said the latest DHS funding offer represents what Democrats have “asked for multiple times” and that Trump has signed off on it. 

Lankford said GOP senators “could” move additional spending on immigration enforcement through the reconciliation process, pointing to the funding they approved just last year in the “big, beautiful” law.

“We’ve had things like that, even in the last year, and then Democrats had things like that in the (Inflation Reduction Act) as well,” he said. 

North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven said he believes Democrats “need to take” the deal on DHS funding. 

“They keep telling us they’ll go with us and now they need to do it,” he said. “They can’t keep trying to back up or change the deal. It’s time to get it done.”

Adding SAVE Act could be difficult

Republicans’ plan to use the complex budget reconciliation process to pass additional funding for immigration and deportation programs as well as elements of their voter identification bill, dubbed the SAVE America Act, could face headwinds. 

Any reconciliation bill would need the support of nearly every Republican in Congress, a complicated obstacle given the party’s especially narrow majority in both chambers. 

The reconciliation process is also arduous and filled with rules at nearly every turn, including that all of its elements must address federal revenue, spending, or debt. And those changes cannot be deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. 

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, cast some doubt on using the reconciliation process to move elements of the SAVE America Act, saying, “I don’t think that’s a good approach.”

West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said Republicans “are at the beginning” of figuring out what, if any, elements of the SAVE America Act can move through the reconciliation process. 

“It’s going to be difficult because it’s not a budgetary impact, it’s a policy impact. But that doesn’t mean some good things can’t move forward that would help with the integrity of the vote,” she said. “So we’ll just have to wait and see. I think reconciliation is probably something we’re going to be strongly considering when we get back.”

Citizenship proof

The legislation has several elements but generally would require Americans to prove their citizenship by showing a birth certificate or a passport when they register to vote. When voters try to cast a ballot they would need to show photo identification. And all states would be required to submit their voter rolls to a DHS database. 

The bill will not be able to make it through the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster given strong opposition from Democrats.

South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said one option for moving “items” in the SAVE America Act through reconciliation would be to provide funding for states to implement some of its provisions. 

“I haven’t seen the specific language on it. I just know that in most cases, what you’re talking about is making money available,” he said. “The policy would not be included, but the resources would be made available because you can’t do policy in reconciliation, you do resources.”

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno said GOP senators will “do whatever we can in reconciliation to get pieces and parts of” the SAVE America Act into law. 

And while he wasn’t entirely sure how Republicans would prove that those changes aren’t “merely incidental” to the multi-trillion-dollar federal budget, he said there is “a whole team of really, really smart people that will answer that question.”

Moreno said Republicans “don’t have to get every single thing in every single way” on the SAVE America Act. 

“You just keep the conversation going,” he said. “Eventually, the American public is going to punish Democrats who aren’t following up on 80-20 issues.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. senators debated Wednesday whether the federal government should change how Americans register to vote and cast a ballot, with Republicans maintaining alterations are necessary to safeguard elections and Democrats arguing a new law would add unnecessary obstacles.

Tensions over the issue were on full display when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said GOP lawmakers describing the bill as a simple voter identification requirement is “bullshit,” shortly before Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee contended it would be “a suicidal move” for his party’s leaders not to find a way forward. 

The legislation, dubbed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, is unlikely to become law without bipartisan backing from at least 60 senators, who would be needed to move past a procedural vote. 

Democrats are not expected to help Republicans with that, especially after Schumer called the legislation “Jim Crow 2.0” and “evil” during a morning press conference with voting rights advocates. 

Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock said during that event GOP lawmakers are acting out of concern they will lose control of Congress following the November midterm elections, due to President Donald Trump’s actions during his second term.  

“The American people have had it with him and with his policies,” Warnock said. “He ran as someone who was going to lower costs, who was going to stay out of endless wars in the Middle East and he is failing. But instead of changing his policies, he’s trying to change the shape of the electorate.”

Problems with lack of birth certificate

New Mexico Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján said if the bill becomes law, it would create difficulties for anyone who doesn’t have access to their birth certificate or a passport, to prove U.S. citizenship when they try to register to vote. 

“What about my Native American brothers and sisters?” he said. “All my brothers and sisters from the First Nations that I’m proud to represent across New Mexico, who may have been born in their home generationally with other family members. They didn’t have a birth certificate.”

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim said GOP lawmakers trying to change the voting process during an election year creates a pattern when combined with several Republican state legislatures redrawing U.S. House maps to benefit their candidates. 

“We see this being about having politicians choose the voters instead of voters choosing the politicians,” he said. 

Several Democratic state legislatures have responded to GOP redistricting efforts by redrawing their maps as well. 

Schumer, D-N.Y., said it’s unacceptable that Republicans want every state in the country to submit a list of registered voters to the Department of Homeland Security to run through a database, which he believes is flawed. 

“They’re trying to dupe America. They say, ‘Oh, this is just a voter ID law.’ Bullshit. It is not a voter ID law,” Schumer said. “It is a law that will kick millions of Americans off the voting rolls.”

‘Debate this as long as it takes to get it done’

Utah’s Lee said Republican leaders shouldn’t schedule the procedural vote that requires at least 60 senators to end debate on the bill until they have found some way to move past that step.  

“I think it would be a suicidal move for us as Senate Republicans, for Republicans in general, if we don’t put everything we’ve got into this,” he said. “I think we need to debate this as long as it takes to get it done. And if we’re not there yet, we need to continue debating.”

Lee contended that prolonged debate on the bill would give Republicans time to sway holdouts to their side. 

“This is going to become popular enough that a lot of our colleagues who currently oppose it, I believe, will start to get on board,” he said. 

Every Senate Democrat, along with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, voted against formally beginning debate on Tuesday. North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis didn’t vote.

Trump wants national limits on voting by mail

Senate debate on the bill dragging out in the days or possibly weeks ahead won’t be confined to what’s currently in the legislation, which the House passed last month.

Trump has asked senators to make three alterations, which they will attempt to incorporate through amendments. 

Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt said he plans to call for a vote to add nationwide restrictions on mail-in voting instead of leaving the issue to state governments. 

“If you have a hardship because of a disability, or an illness, or because of travel, or you’re a caregiver, or some other hardship the state can identify, you can vote by absentee,” he said. “You have to request it. Then you can vote by absentee.”

Schmitt said the carve-out would also include members of the military. 

Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn said she plans to call up an amendment that could create a nationwide prohibition on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth. 

Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, she said, would push for an amendment to block transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

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.

President Donald Trump promoted his second-term record in a wide-ranging speech at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas on Friday, building on themes from his State of the Union address earlier in the week.

But he did not issue a highly anticipated endorsement just days before a heated U.S. Senate primary that’s pitted incumbent John Cornyn against two challengers, state Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.

Before the event, Trump told reporters he had “pretty much” decided on who he would endorse in the midterm election contest, but wouldn’t do so Friday, according to a White House pool report.

While leaving the White House en route to Texas earlier in the day, Trump also suggested he might direct a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, saying the Cuban American community would appreciate such action.

“We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba after many, many years,” he told reporters. “They’re in big trouble, and we could very well (do) something good, I think, very positive for the people that were expelled or worse, from Cuba that live here.”

Tensions are high between the United States and Cuba. The Cuban government said Thursday its border patrol killed four Cuban expatriates living in the United States who sought to infiltrate the country in a speedboat.

Little discussion of energy policy

The Texas speech was advertised as an address on energy, and Trump spoke in front of signs reading “American Energy Dominance” and against a backdrop of oil tankers. 

But he hardly mentioned the issue apart from short sections at the start and end of his remarks in which he claimed credit for lowering gas prices. 

Instead, the president jumped from topic to topic, defending his administration’s controversial record on immigration enforcement and a military operation in Venezuela while attacking Democrats as out of touch and ramping up calls for election administration changes he said would keep the party from winning future elections. 

Among them are the House-passed SAVE America Act, which would require the public to produce a passport or birth certificate in most cases to register to vote. While it has little chance of Senate passage, Trump has continued to advocate for it.

He claimed, without evidence, that Democrats can only win elections by cheating. If Congress makes changes to national elections laws, the party would be shut out, he said.

“They will never win because their policy is no good,” he said. “They want men playing in women’s sports. They want transgender for everyone. They want open borders so that the world’s criminals can pour into our country, which we’ve done a good job. I’ll tell you what: ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has done such a great job.”

Midterm stakes

Trump joked early in the appearance that he was advised to not make political statements.

But several of his digressions were focused on elections this year and beyond.

After exulting, in sometimes exaggerated language, his record through one year of unified GOP control, he said it was crucial for Republicans to maintain their majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. 

Noting that Democratic members did not stand and applaud at several points of his State of the Union address, a point that Republicans have seized upon repeatedly as a campaign issue in the days since the speech, Trump said the Democrats were “crazy.”

“They’re crazy,” he said. “We got to win midterms. We brought this country back. We don’t want to lose the midterms. We got to win the midterms.”

Election forecasters project the most likely outcome of November’s midterms is for Democrats to gain control of the House while Republicans keep the Senate. Very few seats are seen as toss-ups.

Trump also teased a potential third presidential term, which would violate the Constitution’s prohibition of more than two terms. He said he was entitled to another term because an election was “stolen” from him, a reference to the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden and ever since has claimed, without evidence, wrongly decided.

“Maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more?” he asked the crowd. “Well, we’re entitled to it because they cheated like hell in the second.”

Texas Senate GOP battle

In the Senate contest, Trump shouted out Cornyn, Paxton and Hunt, without indicating which he might favor.

Election Day is Tuesday, though with three major candidates, it is likely headed for a May runoff between Cornyn and Paxton.

Trump wore a version of his signature red hat with the phrase “Gulf of America” across the front instead of the usual “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico early in his second term. Corpus Christi’s port is on the gulf.

Venezuela 

At the open and close of the roughly hourlong speech, Trump promoted his energy policy and criticized Biden for regulations that Trump said slowed energy production. 

By boosting production and bringing in oil from Venezuela after deposing leftist President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump said he has brought down the price of gas and consumer products across the board.

Biden and congressional Democrats “waged a radical-left war on American oil and natural gas like you’ve never seen before,” he said. “They were killing our country…. All of that changed my first day back in office.”

The latest government statistics, though, show that energy costs in January were about the same as they were when Trump took office, dropping only .1%, while inflation in the economy as a whole stubbornly continues at about 2.4%.

U.S. involvement in Venezuela, following Maduro’s capture, would also help spur the energy sector, Trump said. 

The new government, led by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, has been receptive to selling crude oil to the United States, where it will be refined, Trump said Friday. The arrangement would benefit both countries, he said.

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.