What is the SAVE America Act?

The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act is a bill in Congress that would require every American to provide documentary proof of citizenship – in person – to register to vote in federal elections, or to change or update their voter registration to vote in federal elections. This bill would also require new photo ID requirements for federal elections, and requires states to turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security.

 

This bill passed in the US House February 11, 2026, and will now go to Committee in the US Senate. You can read the House bill here. 
 

Are the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act the same?

No. The SAVE America Act is worse. 
 

The SAVE Act, a bill that was passed by the US House in 2025, and a similar version before that in 2024, focuses on new, strict requirements for voter registration (more below). 

 

The SAVE America Act, introduced in 2026, includes the same strict voter registration restrictions as previous versions of the SAVE Act but adds:

• photo ID requirements for in-person voting: voters would be required to provide government-issued photo ID to vote in person; specifically U.S. passports, driver's licenses, state IDs, military IDs and tribal IDs.

• photo ID requirements for absentee voting: voters would be required to include a copy of an eligible photo ID both when requesting and submitting an absentee ballot.

• requirement that states to turn over their voter registration list to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database: this database has been shown to have frequent inaccuracies and inadequate privacy protection. The bill would also allow federal agencies to share private information with each other and with the heads of federal departments. 

• criminal penalties, including imprisonment, on election workers for mistakenly registering voters without proof of citizenship: these penalties would apply even if the individual is a US Citizen.

 

Why is the SAVE America Act bad?

To start, it’s important to know these requirements are wholly unnecessary, as citizenship is already verified by election officials in every state before voter granting eligibility, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare. 

 

But the real issue is that very few kinds of documentation meet the “documentary proof of citizenship” definition. The narrow kinds of accepted ID would make registering to vote difficult, if not impossible, for millions of eligible voters. 

• Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) needs to show citizenship on its face—the document must explicitly say the holder is a citizen. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, documentation would be limited to birth certificates, passports, and naturalization certificates only.

• REAL ID cards in most states would not be accepted: In all but 5 states (Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington), REAL ID cards don’t show citizenship. Driver’s licenses, state-issued IDs, and US Veterans ID would also not be accepted. 

If an eligible voter doesn’t have a passport and their name doesn’t match their birth certificate or naturalization papers, the process for deciding voter eligibility is left to the state. What that would actually look like is unclear. 

• States can make their own rules about what kind of additional documentation is required to prove the voter’s identity, but there are no standards for what that would be: A state could decide a marriage certificate showing the eligible voter’s name change in concert with their birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship– that kind of ambiguity makes room for policies that could make proving citizenship almost impossible for many. Election officials are allowed to offer voters who bring DPOC that doesn’t match their name the chance to sign an affidavit attesting they are the same person, but they don’t have to and many states will not.

• Whatever a state decides has to go through legal channels, which can take a long time and leave many eligible voters behind: If there’s an election before Ohio passes a new law to address this, countless Ohioans could be denied their constitutional right to vote.

 

SAVE America Act would only allow voter registration in person with an election official. If the SAVE America Act becomes law, eligible voters could only register or re-register in person, and only election officials would be able to register or re-register them.

• This would effectively end voter registration by mail, online voter registration, and community voter drives: Eligible voters would be banned from registering or updating their voter registration by mail, through community registration drives at schools, churches, and public events, at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), or anywhere else election officials were not. In addition to severely limiting Ohioans’ opportunities to vote, this would also place an extraordinary burden on our election system, which does not have the capacity to verify citizenship eligibility in person for thousands and thousands of Ohioans. 

• If SAVE America was passed into law today, the only place in Ohio where people could register or re-register would be county Boards of Elections: Ohio has only one per county.

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See more about the millions of Ohioans who would be impacted if the SAVE Act came into law here. 

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Tell US Senators Moreno and Husted to OPPOSE the SAVE Act here.​