Everything to know about the SAVE America Act voter ID bill

The SAVE America Act is a top priority for President Donald Trump that he has been mentioning at every opportunity — in appearances before reporters in the Oval Office, at campaign-style rallies in rooms full of supporters and in musings on his Truth Social platform.

The Senate this week is expected to begin marathon debate on the elections bill that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to cast a ballot.

Trump, GOP hardliners and conservative influencers like Elon Musk say the Senate must pass the bill, which the House advanced in February. Democrats strongly oppose the legislation, and voting rights groups warn it could disenfranchise millions.

Here is a breakdown of what is in the bill, who it could affect and why it has been the subject of so much controversy:

Most Democrats and voting rights groups have warned the legislation could disenfranchise millions of voters by imposing citizenship and photographic identification requirements. 

Around 21 million Americans do not have documents proving their citizenship readily available and 2.6 million Americans lack government-issued photo ID of any kind, according to the Brennan Center for Justice and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. Low-income and minority voters are more likely to lack the documents required in the SAVE America Act, and people who have changed their last names — primarily married women —would also face additional barriers to registering.

Democrats have also warned the SAVE America Act is part of a broader attempt by Trump to alter the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections, which will decide control of the House and Senate and set the tone for Trump’s final two years in office.

Trump for years has warned about the threats of noncitizen voting and claimed — without evidence — that U.S. elections are not secure. He has doubled down on these claims in recent months ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, warning he will be impeached for a third time if Democrats take back the House and Senate. Trump in recent months has called to nationalize elections and threatened to impose voter-ID laws and ban mail-in voting by executive order.

“The Save America Act is one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself. NO MORE RIGGED ELECTIONS! Voter I.D., Proof of Citizenship, No Rigged Mail-In Voting (We are the only Country in the World that allows this!),” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday.

Laws vary from state-to-state. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 36 states have laws requiring or requesting voters show some form of ID to vote. Of those, 10 have strict photo-ID laws.

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., do not require any ID to vote and instead use other information to verify voters’ identity, like a signature that is checked against a database.

Registration rules also vary by state, but a 2002 federal law requires first-time voters who vote by mail and have not provided verification of their identity to do so before casting a ballot. Valid documents include photo ID, bank statements, utility bills or paychecks. Most states require voters to attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens before registering to vote.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

There have been numerous attempts in the past to establish federal voter-ID laws, some of which picked up momentum in Congress. 

One such proposal was led by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., and advanced out of the House in 2006. That legislation would have created a voter-ID requirement for the 2008 election and by 2010 would have required photo ID to prove citizenship. It also would have required states to set up programs to distribute IDs to voters, in some cases at no cost. The bill never got a vote in the Senate.

Democratic opposition to these efforts also goes back decades. In 2005, Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, introduced a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that voter-ID requirements should be rejected.

More recently, a slightly pared-down version the SAVE America Act — dubbed simply the SAVE Act — advanced out of the House last year. The SAVE Act contained the same noncitizen voting provisions as the SAVE American Act, but it did not include language imposing photo ID at polling places.

Voting rights groups generally agree voter fraud is exceedingly rare. 

In Georgia, where after losing the 2020 election, Trump claimed thousands of dead people voted. A report commissioned by the president found scant evidence. A voter fraud database compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation lists 1,620 instances of documented fraud dating back to 1982 — amounting to a tiny fraction of total ballots cast in that more than 40-year period.

The legislation would require states to verify citizenship status — in some cases by sharing their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security — which would then cross-reference the list with its internal citizenship database. Any registered voters who are flagged would then have to prove their citizenship or else be removed from voter rolls.

Any Real ID that shows proof of citizenship would be acceptable under the SAVE America Act. That includes a U.S. passport, birth certificate, military or tribal ID. A recent analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that around 12% of registered voters do not have ready access to the necessary documents. People with higher incomes and higher levels of education are more likely than other Americans to have access to such documents, BPC found.

The legislation’s provisions would take effect immediately upon passage. Some state election officials have warned of the potential difficulty of implementing such changes in an election year if the legislation passes before the November midterms.

The California attorney general’s office in a statement in February said the measure “would require states to fundamentally restructure their voter registration procedures” by creating new systems for document verification and criminalizing mistakes made by election officials with penalties of up to five years in prison.