Some states are pushing to advance President Donald Trump’s voting restrictions agenda, even as Republicans in Congress have stalled in delivering on his request ahead of the midterms.
At least 15 different states have passed legislation tightening ballot access since the start of the second Trump administration. They range from Louisiana, where the governor signed a bill in May that will mandate annual checks of voter registration rolls against the administration’s revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, to a law passed in Florida that will require residents to use an updated state ID with a citizenship marker to vote by 2027.
South Dakota passed the South Dakota SAVE Act this year as an emergency measure that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote before the primaries. Republicans in the state were motivated to pass it after they found nearly 300 noncitizens on its voter rolls a year and a half ago.
“It’s elevated their concerns to make sure that we only have citizens registering to vote,” South Dakota state Sen. John Carley, a Republican, said about voters in his state. “This allows us on a state level, in the midst of them kind of dithering in Congress, to get that done. The states can certainly enact it.”
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These measures are moves toward the core of Trump’s SAVE America Act: proof of citizenship in order to vote.
That agenda has been bolstered by recent drama in New Jersey. Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, revealed that 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote from June 2023 to June 2024 in the state due to a software glitch — and approximately 400 of them cast a ballot in that time.
“There certainly seems to be an effort to try to sort of weaponize this news to further the federal administration’s disenfranchisement agenda,” Liza Weisberg, a supervising attorney for the ACLU of New Jersey, told NOTUS. “I don’t think that this news, the events out of New Jersey, justify the kinds of really aggressive anti-voter legislation that is being pushed.”
Trump’s efforts to push more election security legislation on the federal level has prompted a discussion about whether those efforts could be better addressed by the states. Many Republican state lawmakers have decided that there’s some role for them to play.
“We try to be proactive, we try to be forward thinking, and not wait until Election Day for the bad thing to happen. But we can look at improving our own code or see what the trends are around the country, and then try to adapt accordingly,” Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, told NOTUS.
In Congress, some Republicans have supported Trump’s embrace of voting restrictions as a priority. In April, the House passed the SAVE Act, which, among other provisions, would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, require that voters’ eligibility be checked against the SAVE system and would eliminate mail-in and online voter registration.
The Senate has debated for months about Trump’s preferred SAVE America Act, which is similar to the SAVE Act but additionally requires ID to request a mail-in ballot or vote at the polls. The bill lacks the votes for Republicans to pass it without getting rid of the filibuster.
“The SAVE America Act isn’t going away,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the bill’s sponsor, said in a social media post in July. “Nor are the American people, no matter how much Democrats try to import new voters for themselves.”
Several Republicans told NOTUS that federalizing those requirements would likely be a step too far for the legislators hoping to assuage voters’ concerns this election year and would prefer the states address it.
“The idea of requiring photo ID, I agree with that. But as far as federalizing the entire elections system, look, that’s our secretary of state’s job. That’s Mississippi’s job to make sure that we have secure elections. I don’t think that needs to be a federalized system,” Mississippi state Sen. Jeremy England told NOTUS.
There is little evidence that noncitizen voting is widespread across the country.
But many voters appear to favor the idea of implementing additional identification requirements. A Pew Research poll from last year found that 83% of respondents across the political spectrum believed everyone should be required to show government-issued photo ID to vote. At least 13 states and Washington, D.C., do not require photo ID to vote at the polls on Election Day, according to the Voting Rights Lab.
As the midterms near, Democrats are worried about just how far the president will go to exert control over elections. In an interview on Tuesday with the conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root, the president declined to rule out declaring a national security emergency to enforce proof of citizenship and limit mail-in voting.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Trump said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
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