As Republicans’ fortunes have dimmed forward of the 2026 midterm elections, they’ve more and more turned a panicked eye toward voting restrictions.
And to many GOP lawmakers, nothing is as pressing as passing the SAVE Act. It’s a invoice that will require proof of citizenship to register to vote, amongst different provisions. The invoice not too long ago acquired its fiftieth Republican co-sponsor in the Senate — after already passing in the House — and a few need celebration leaders to gut the filibuster to force it through.
It’s a push that makes logical and political sense for the GOP. Polls from 2024 confirmed help for requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote ranged from 67% to 83% of respondents. Some Republicans have argued that, though it’s already unlawful for noncitizens to vote and there’s scant evidence of undocumented immigrants voting, it’s a worthwhile safeguard.
But latest knowledge and historical past recommend there may very well be actual hazard that such restrictions will create greater issues than they remedy.
Specifically, the chance is that they disenfranche people who find themselves legally allowed to vote however both can’t fulfill the restrictions (due to an absence of documentation) or decline to go to the difficulty of doing so.
(Critics of the laws have raised specific issues about disenfranchising individuals who lack paperwork, together with voters of coloration and younger individuals, and ladies whose married names don’t seem on their delivery certificates or passports.)
And given the dearth of proof that noncitizen voting quantities to a big drawback, the chance of doing extra hurt than good is fairly excessive.
We have a rising quantity of cautionary tales, together with in a latest effort by some crimson states to use a federal database to root out noncitizens on their voter rolls.
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune over the weekend printed an investigation into states which have sought to exclude noncitizen voters utilizing a Department of Homeland Security instrument referred to as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
In Missouri, state officers advised counties to make voters who have been flagged as potential noncitizens by the instrument quickly unable to vote. But the investigation discovered lots of of examples of individuals being incorrectly flagged.
NCS’s Fredreka Schouten discovered related issues earlier this month.
In Idaho, about 760 individuals have been initially flagged, however solely a few dozen circumstances have been later referred to state police for doable prison costs.
In Texas, state officers have given voters flagged by the system 30 days to confirm their citizenship or be dropped from the voter rolls. In one county as of early February, 55 of 84 individuals flagged by the system hadn’t responded to notices. About half of the remainder had been improperly added to voter rolls by directors, whereas the opposite half proved their citizenship.
The numbers of mistakenly flagged voters, whereas not overwhelming, are fairly notably greater than the overall quantity of recognized noncitizen voters in latest federal elections.
The pro-Trump Heritage Foundation retains a database of voter fraud crimes. It contains fewer than 100 cases of noncitizen voting between 2002 and 2022.
And a research from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice of the 2016 election likewise discovered simply 30 suspected noncitizen votes out of 23 million votes studied.
The conditions are dynamic, and voters have possibilities to confirm their eligibility. But the conditions in Missouri and Texas increase the prospect that the quantity of eligible voters who may very well be incorrectly excluded might be larger than the quantity of noncitizen voters in latest elections. That’s particularly the case in Texas, the place the burden falls on the voter to right any errors.
And the experiences of states which have sought to require proof of citizenship in their elections additionally speaks to this potential drawback.
New Hampshire lawmakers in 2024 handed one of the strictest proof-of-citizenship necessities in the nation. A voting rights group later discovered that, throughout low-profile elections in the state in 2025, 244 people who tried to vote were turned away.
In Arizona, the state has a bifurcated system in which individuals who don’t present proof of citizenship can register to vote in federal elections, however not state elections. A Brennan Center study final 12 months discovered the ensuing group of “federal-only” voters have been disproportionately voters of coloration and considerably much less doubtless to be Republican.
And maybe essentially the most pertinent instance is Kansas.
A 2011 state legislation requiring proof of citizenship wound up blocking the voter registrations of more than 30,000 US citizens — about 12% of all individuals in search of to register for the primary time.
The legislation was later struck down by the federal courts. In doing so, a US district court famous that the state had simply 39 noncitizens who registered to vote between 1999 and 2013 – whereas qualifying that many or most of them might need been registered by way of administrative errors.
So that’s greater than 30,000 blocked registrations – to repair an issue that the information pegged to be in the handfuls, if that.
The defendant in the lawsuit that in the end resulted in the legislation being blocked was Republican Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who had supported it as a state legislator however has since cautioned states and the federal authorities concerning the potential threat of requiring proof of citizenship.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Schwab told the Associated Press in 2024. “It didn’t work out so well.”