How the SAVE America Act Leaves Policy Wins on the Table
Introduction to a series
This post is less data-heavy than I aspire to in this Substack, but setting the policy context is important before the two next posts, which are full of data.
President Trump has made no secret that passage of the SAVE America Act is his top legislative priority. The Act’s stated goals—[1]to require identification to vote and prevent non-citizen voting—are popular with the public. Still, the Act is on the path to legislative failure. Why? Although the news and Trump are currently focused on the parliamentary hurdle in the Senate, the deep answer is that while the goals may be popular, the statute as written overshoots even the most conservative state laws.
The current attention on the roadblocks presented by the Senate attributes the SAVE America Act’s problems to the filibuster, but the more interesting question is whether the Act would pass absent the filibuster. A strong argument can be made that there aren’t 50 votes in the body for the Act. That reality illustrates well the gap between embracing general principles and passing legislation.
The SAVE America Act faces more than a filibuster problem
Focusing on four pivotal Republican senators illustrates the point. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has publicly opposed the Act, and three other Republican senators—Collins, McConnell, and Tillis—voted against an effort to attach the SAVE America Act to the reconciliation bill last June. With 53 Republican senators, losing them again would sink the Act.
Like nearly all Republicans in the general public—and even most Democrats—senators Murkowski, Collins, McConnell, and Tillis support requiring voters to show a photo ID when they vote. Republican state legislatures throughout the country have enacted or expanded voter ID requirements over the past decade and have begun requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register, as well. Ballot measures across the country have passed in all but a few of the states where they have been presented to voters.
Murkowski’s expressed opposition to the SAVE America Act, and the likely opposition of some of her colleagues, allows us to consider the gap between broad approval of the idea of voter ID or citizenship verification and the practicalities of writing a bill that would pass Congress. As she wrote in an opinion piece published by the Anchorage Daily News and stated in a Senate speech, the bill would erect significant voting barriers to virtually all Alaskans, with the highest barriers facing women, Native Americans, and rural residents. The problem is not the idea of voter ID or citizenship verification, it’s that the statute as written creates unnecessary barriers to many voters.
The tendency of Congress to defer to the states in governing their elections runs deep, so there is no guarantee that even a bill that addressed Sen. Murkowski’s objections would pass Congress. Still, the failure of SAVE America Act supporters to fine-tune its requirements to win the support of wavering Republicans, and even some Democrats, gives it all the signs of a messaging bill, rather than an effort to achieve policy results.
Republican-controlled legislatures have broadly embraced photo ID laws. We can learn a lot about how these legislatures have crafted bills to implement voter ID requirements and promote proof of citizenship.
Americans want voter ID and non-citizens off the voter rolls, but they also distrust Big Brother
At its core, the states have had to address two major features of American political culture that have, in turn, complicated election administration. These are distrust of government and a fragmented public administration.
First, both voter ID and citizenship verification bump up against deep-seated cultural norms that resist governmental intrusion into Americans’ lives. American political norms and institutions have resisted mandating a national—or even state—registry of all citizens and their addresses. Other robust democratic countries require this, which makes it easier both to keep track of citizens and non-citizens and to issue official identification to everyone.
The second feature flows from the first. We don’t have a national list of citizens, nor do we have a complete national list of where people live. What we have are data sources for the administration of social programs that also include information about citizenship, including the Social Security Administration. States don’t have a comprehensive list of their residents, only those who have driver’s licenses and perhaps other recipients of public assistance.[2] The holders of these data can share them, but the systems weren’t designed to interoperate, and there are gaps. Together, all these data sources can account for nearly all citizens, but “nearly all” isn’t “all.”
The enhanced SAVE system illustrates how “nearly all” is not “all”
A good example is the recent effort by the Department of Homeland Security to enhance its SAVE system, which was designed to identify resident aliens and those who have naturalized, by adding the ability to also query Social Security records, which includes a data flag for where a person is a citizen. According to records released in litigation, 3% of SAVE program responses for voter verification as of August 2025 were returned because of a non-definitive response; that is, it was impossible to locate a matching record, or more information was needed to yield a match. Thus, it appears that the federal government can produce the functional equivalent of a list of nearly all adult citizens, but not all of them.
In a country of over 340 million people and 236 million eligible voters, the gap between all and nearly all can amount to millions of people, and the gaps are likely to fall unevenly across age, race, geography, and mobility status. As we will see in later posts, the political consequences, while small, are likely to fall unevenly, and in ways that will surprise many.
Neither resistance to national residential registration nor the lack of a single citizenship registry is a reason alone to oppose requiring identification to vote or ensuring that only citizens are on the voting rolls. (And to be clear, there are many serious arguments against these policies, but those arguments are mostly championed by Democrats, who are currently the minority in Congress.) But factors such as these are why laws and policies need to be carefully designed so that the millions of citizens who exist in the gaps aren’t disfranchised as the price paid to address the tiny amount of voter impersonation fraud or the small number of non-citizens on the voter rolls.
State safeguards
States that have adopted voter ID requirements or have scoured their rolls for non-citizens have addressed these risks—some better than others, and some more or less to the liking of election activists. They have addressed these risks through a portfolio of devices, such as cure procedures, exceptions, free IDs, and administrative flexibility. The SAVE America Act is silent about the risks posed by its provisions and the commonly used techniques to address them. Indeed, by threatening to criminalize election officials who make innocent mistakes, it leans into the risks.
What comes next in this series
These are general thoughts, but each of the two major features of the Act has its own unique features, as well. That will be my focus over the next few weeks. My next post will address the voter ID features of the Act; the following post will take up the citizenship verification requirements.
In those two posts, I focus on the data we can use to understand why large majorities of Americans favor some form of voter ID requirement and attention to citizenship verification, the size of the problem these reforms address, and the size of the gaps that need to be addressed to account for the fact we weren’t all born with a passport in our hands and a locator beacon tied around our necks.
[1] All em-dashes in this post were generated by a human.
[2] One possible exception is my home state of Massachusetts, which conducts an annual census.