Name: What is the SAVE America Act requiring voter ID?
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T23:01:20.000Z
Duration: 5 min
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The House has officially passed the GOP's Save America Act.

The act would require government mandated proof of citizenship, such as passports or birth certificates, to register to vote.

It would also require states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls supporters of the bill say would protect election integrity and crack down on noncitizen voting, while opponents argue the bill would make registering harder for millions of voters.

So the Constitution already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal and state elections, and

state election boards say instances of noncitizen voting are rare.

The bill now heads over to the Senate, where it faces a potential filibuster from the Democrats.

So let's bring in ABC News legal contributor James Sample for more on this.

This is a bill that would dramatically change the role of the federal government in the administration of federal elections.

Even though federal elections are by definition for federal office, they are administered primarily at the state level.

And that that is a function of Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which the framers of the Constitution made very clear, gives the states the primary responsibility for administering elections and gives the federal government only a small backup role.

But this would dramatically shift that balance if it were to become law.

And it would most importantly and most immediately pose significant barriers for individuals, many individuals who are already US Citizens, who've in many cases voted many times properly because they would have to obtain not just identification, but

identification that in many instances would require them to show a passport or a birth certificate establishing U.S.

Now, for many Americans, most Americans even that is not a significant hardship.

But for a significant percentage of Americans, that would be a hardship that would prevent them from voting.

The question becomes, is that cost disenfranchising at least a significant fraction of 21 million Americans worth the benefit of preventing non citizens from voting?

When we know from study after study that there are only a small, and

we're talking single digits per election year, number of noncitizens who actually cast a vote.

So it seems like that these are some major impacts this bill could have on voters.

Oh, there is no doubt that if this bill were to pass through the Senate, and

to be clear, I think that's unlikely at the moment, but

if the majority leader in the Senate, John Thune, elects to do away with the filibuster, then this bill could, that was the so called nuclear option, then this bill would pass the Senate and it would go to the President and it would have a dramatic impact and it would be an immediate impact in the 2026 midterms.

There would be, in many instances, chaos, because the transition period, we think about November as being a long way away from the standpoint of election administration.

This would be an upheaval of historic proportion.

So if this bill does become law, what kind of legal challenges could we see?

You will see legal challenges from the states who will argue that this is a violation of that constitutional provision that I referenced before Article 1, Section 4, saying that they have the primary responsibility to.

They would also argue, the 10th Amendment, that this is an intrusion on federalism.

And what's fascinating is that this is a bit of a juxtaposition.

Normally it is Democrats in Congress trying to pass legislation that prevents discriminatory practices, such as passing the Voting Rights act in federal elections.

There would also be challenges from individual voters who would face the possibility of being disenfranchised.

And then Republicans are introducing another bill, the Make Elections Great Again Act.

It would ban universal mail in voting, among other restrictions.

How would these proposals change federal involvement in elections?

Well, first, I think it's worth the two of us acknowledging the clever naming devices of all of these bills.

I mean, Americans for Apple Pie sounds very good, but

Make Elections Great Again, that act is actually more severe, more extreme than the Save America act is, in the sense that it would mandate that states undertake monthly purges of their voter rolls.

And the problem with that, it sounds innocuous on its face, but

one thing that we have learned in study after study is that databases of names are rife with errors.

And the matching problem, somebody uses a middle initial, somebody uses a married name, maiden name.

These things are very difficult, and it would cause chaos for sure.