Senate Faces Mounting Pressure to Restrict Voting Rights

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would require every voter to provide proof of citizenship in person to register to vote or change one’s voter registration, and it practically eliminates mail-in voting—requirements that critics say threatens the freedom to vote for all Americans, especially those in rural America.

Trump’s pressure on senators to pass the SAVE Act (which he has rebranded the “SAVE America Act”) has increased exponentially as the election draws closer. With most of his election-related executive orders having been blocked by the courts, Trump now faces a narrow legislative path to pass his key priorities. 

On June 25, a federal court in Boston ruled that several sections of Trump’s March 2026 executive order restricting mail-in ballots were unconstitutional. Then on July 10, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan bill reducing housing costs unless Congress passed the SAVE Act. The housing bill’s overwhelming support was veto-proof, so it became law without presidential signature or a veto.

Graham’s death, Trump claimed, was “a big blow to the SAVE America Act,” yet he and far-right Republicans in the House and Senate now appear more determined than ever to pass the SAVE Act into law.

The bill cleared the House in February , but has since stalled in the Senate, blocked by fractures in Republican leadership and unified Democratic resistance. With their majority of 53 seats, Republicans would need at least 7 Democrats to clear the 60-vote threshold under the Senate’s filibuster rule, or otherwise bypass the filibuster using the same legislative maneuvers that allowed them to pass last year’s reconciliation bill.

House Republicans are reportedly looking to do just that. In addition to the version of the SAVE Act they passed in February (H.R. 22), Republicans have introduced at least two other versions of the law (H.R. 256 and H.R. 7296) and are considering attaching some version of the SAVE Act to upcoming appropriations bills and other legislation to put additional pressure on the Senate.

“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math,” said Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.) on the Senate floor Thursday morning, in a sign of the growing intraparty feud around the bill.

Tillis, who is retiring at the end of this year, added:

I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election.

What is the SAVE Act?

“American citizens—and only American citizens—should decide American elections,” states the U.S. president’s official website Whitehouse.gov. “The Save America Act is a common sense, bipartisan bill that would simply require:

• A Valid ID Before Registering to Vote in a Federal Election
• Proof of Citizenship
• No Mail-in Ballots (Except for Illness, Disability, Military or Travel).”

Opponents of the bill frequently point out that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal and state elections, and the instances of non-citizens voting is less than one-tenth of one percent of the voting public. For example, out of Utah’s more than 2 million registered voters, 27 were found to be non-citizens, according to a recent voter roll review by the state. In a report that reviewed public disclosures by states across the country about noncitizen voting, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) found “miniscule numbers” of non-citizens voting in the 2024 election. In Iowa, for example, 35 non-citizens cast ballots out of 1.67 million votes cast, and in Michigan, 16 non-citizens cast ballots out of about 5.7 votes recorded.

As for mail-in ballots, which Trump called “inherently corrupt” in his Thursday address, NPR reported that Trump himself used one in the 2020 election. Not only that, he didn’t mail it in himself.

“Trump submitted the Florida primary ballot by giving it to a third party to return, a spokesperson for the Palm Beach elections supervisor confirmed to NPR on Wednesday,” the radio network reported in August 2020. “Republicans often derisively refer to sending in a ballot this way as ‘ballot harvesting,’ and it’s something Trump has criticized.”

For the 60 million Americans living in rural areas, the law would create economic and logistical obstacles to voting. A 2025 report published by American Progress showed that in the largest U.S. counties, voters would average a 4.5-hour roundtrip with some having to travel as long as 8 hours to bring the proper documents to their election office in person. That would be to register. They’d have to do it all over again to vote.

The act applies to all new voters, residents who have moved—even to a new apartment in the same building—changed their names due to marriage or other reasons or switched political parties, even just for a day.

The Real ID that most Americans now carry, as well as military and tribal IDs, would not meet the proof of citizenship requirement, according to the Center for American Progress (CAP). A certified birth certificate ($10 to $60) or passport ($165) would be required, a financial burden and mail delay or travel expense that hits rural Americans disproportionately.

Nonpartisan groups and some Republicans are speaking up against the act.

“The bill’s central premise is popular: noncitizens should not vote,” wrote self-described conservative Republicans Reid Ribble and Tom Corbett in Time Magazine on July 8. “We agree. However, federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.”

As Ribble and Corbett write:

A young voter registering for the first time may not have a passport. A married woman whose legal name no longer matches her birth certificate may need to produce additional documentation. A rural voter may have to travel a long distance to an election office. A low-income worker may struggle to take time off during business hours. A service member stationed away from home may face barriers that civilians never encounter. A citizen who has voted for decades may suddenly need to produce paperwork simply because they moved, changed names, or updated their registration. These are not theoretical concerns. They are ordinary facts of everyday American life.

Ribble served as a congressman from Wisconsin (2011-2017) and Corbett as governor (2011-2015) and attorney general of Pennsylvania.

Republican voters may be impacted more than Democratic ones. CAP research shows that passport ownership is much higher in blue states than in red. Conservative and Republican-leaning women are twice as likely to be among the 84% of women who change their name when they marry, meaning their birth certificate cannot serve as proof of their identity.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund raises additional issues. The act, it says, would “Functionally eliminate online and mail-in voter registration,” and “severely disrupt in-person voter registration drives, which have been essential for mobilizing political participation in Black communities and other historically marginalized communities,” according to the LDF website.  

Other ways to suppress the vote

The Trump administration, faced with conflicting federal court decisions, has given four states—Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana—access to a combined database of Social Security Administration and Systematic Alien Verification for Eligibility (SAVE) database. A separate federal court decision required the Department of Homeland Security to shut down the system, saying it violates privacy and administrative rules.

Appeals are in process, according to voting rights expert Marc Elias in his publication Democracy Docket.

Even if the SAVE Act remains stalled in congress, a number of states have spent the last few years passing SAVE Act-like laws that control access to voting. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, nine states—Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia—have passed 12 restrictive voting laws as of May 2026. Nine of the 12 will be in effect in time for this year’s mid-terms.

The report defines restrictive as laws that contain provisions making it “harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or vote compared to existing state law.”

Restricting access to voting didn’t start in 2026, though. In 2025, at least 19 states enacted such voting laws.

“The explosion of restrictive voting legislation that began after the 2020 election has turned into a regular feature of the election landscape, with well over a hundred such laws enacted in the past five years,” the report states. “Many of the laws come from the same core group of states: Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Texas, and Wyoming have each enacted at least 5 restrictive laws since 2021.”

In contrast, at least six states—Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington—passed 16 more expansive voting laws, 14 of which will be in effect in time for the mid-terms. The report defines these as laws that make it easier to register to vote, stay on voter rolls or vote.

This question of who stays on voter rolls has been raised by journalists from muckraker Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, to Alice Chapman, former senior counsel to the Brennan Center. Across the nation, voters are discovering they are ineligible to vote after they walk into their polling place due to purged voter registration lists.

In other instances, ballots are simply not being counted. According to an Election Assistance Commission 2024 report, more than a half million mail-in ballots were never counted, unbeknownst to the voters who mailed them. The same report admits that of the states that keep records, fewer than 74% of provisional ballots were ever counted, leaving nearly 436,000 votes uncounted.

Readers can find and contact their U.S. senators here and sign up for election protection training in your area at Rural Defenders Union or Indivisible’s midterm election protection program.

Suzan EremMore by this author →

Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.