A growing number of Republican-led states are moving swiftly to implement new voting restrictions, plowing ahead on a key plank of President Donald Trump’s agenda that has so far been stuck on Capitol Hill.
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A growing number of Republican-led states are moving swiftly to implement new voting restrictions, plowing ahead on a key plank of President Donald Trump’s agenda that has so far been stuck on Capitol Hill.
Last week, Republican-controlled legislatures in Utah and South Dakota approved legislation requiring proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections. The measures now await action by governors.
On Thursday, lawmakers in Florida — home to more than 13 million registered voters — passed their own citizenship verification bill.
Meanwhile, in states where Democrats control the levers of power, proponents of election-rule changes that Democrats oppose are working to enact them through ballot measures. That includes California, where a voter ID measure appears headed to the November ballot and will affect the state’s 23 million voters, if successful.
Those state efforts mean tens of millions of voters around the country could face new rules and restrictions in future elections, even if national legislation never moves forward.
Requiring individuals to provide citizenship documents when they register to vote and to present identification whenever they cast ballots are cornerstones of the proposed federal “SAVE America Act,” a top Trump priority.
The bill passed the US House last month, but it has bogged down in the US Senate, where Republicans hold the majority but do not have enough votes to overcome a filibuster from Democrats.
The president — who repeatedly makes baseless allegations that US elections are rife with fraud — has stepped up his rhetoric about the bill in recent days, saying he will refuse to sign any legislation until Congress enacts new voting rules. He’s also called for lawmakers to add more elements to the proposal, including ending no-excuse mail-in voting and banning transgender athletes in sports.
This week, the president suggested putting restrictions in place would help his party prevail in this fall’s high-stakes congressional elections. “It’ll guarantee the midterms,” he said Monday during a retreat of House Republicans at his golf club in Doral, Florida. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”
Debate rages in Florida
Hundreds of miles north of Doral, Republicans in Tallahassee have moved forward on a key pillar of Trump’s voting agenda.
“While the important debate over the SAVE America Act happens on the national stage, we can and must continue to lead in Florida as the gold standard in election integrity,” state Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the Florida House, said during a recent committee debate.
The bill requires election officials to verify voters’ citizenship status with information already on file with the state.
Millions of Floridians already have provided citizenship documents to the state’s motor vehicle agency, to comply with Real ID requirements. Voters whose citizenship cannot be verified could eventually be removed from the rolls if they don’t provide proof of citizenship.
Persons-Mulicka said voters will be given multiple opportunities to demonstrate their eligibility before removal.
Opponents say the change will ensnare many voters in additional paperwork requirements — especially younger, first-time voters and disabled residents who might lack a driver’s license, along with older Floridians who may have given up their driver’s license years ago.
“Tens of thousands, if not more, US citizens who are seniors who are already registered will be removed or have to provide additional documentation to provide their citizenship,” said Brad Ashwell, Florida director of All Voting is Local, a voting rights group opposed to the measure.
During the recent floor debate, Miami-area state Rep. Ashley Gantt called the new requirements “effectively another poll tax.”
The Democrat said she has spent a year trying to obtain a birth certificate to help her elderly aunt renew her Florida’s driver’s license. Her aunt, she said, was born in 1950 in a small town in segregated South Carolina with no nearby Black hospital. And because she was born at home, she was never issued a birth certificate.
“This is what a lot of Black folks who were born during the Jim Crow era have to contend with,” she said.
The bill also imposes new voter identification requirements and excludes IDs issued by colleges and universities as an acceptable form of identification. That mirrors an approach taken in the federal SAVE America Act.
Under the bill approved Thursday, the new voting rules in Florida will take effect in 2027 and will not be in place for this year’s midterm elections.
It now heads to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk. On Thursday, he voiced support for the legislation in a social media post.
Looming showdown in California
In California, where Democrats control state government, a battle is shaping up over a proposed ballot measure that would impose voter ID and citizenship verification requirements.
Proponents of the voter ID initiative recently announced they had collected more than 1.3 million signatures on petitions — far exceeding the nearly 875,000 required under state law — to put new voting requirements to voters on the November ballot.
Election officials must verify the signatures before the initiative can be put on the ballot. State Assembly Member Carl DeMaio, a Republican who is one of the main proponents of the voter ID push, said he’s confident the signatures will be validated.
In California, there’s no requirement that voters produce identification at the polls. In 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom — a potential 2028 presidential contender — signed legislation that barred local governments from imposing voter ID, after the city of Huntington Beach sought to do so.
For ballots returned by mail, election officials must verify that the signature on the ballot envelope matches one in election records.
The initiative would change the state constitution to mandate that voters show government-issued identification each time they cast ballots in person. Additionally, those who vote by mail — a widely used option in California — would be required to include the last four digits of a “unique identifying number” on file in their voter registration records when they return their ballots.
DeMaio, who oversees a group called Reform California, insists the changes will make it easier to cast ballots, in part because voters’ signatures will no longer have to match those on file. (In November’s special election on redistricting in California, more than 83,000 mail-in ballots were rejected because they either lacked voters’ signatures or the signatures didn’t match in election records, according to a report by the California secretary of state’s office. Nearly 10.5 million mail-in ballots were returned in that election.)
DeMaio said people attending his organization’s focus groups welcomed an alternative to signature-matching.
Julia Gomez, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of South California, argues that voters could just as easily make mistakes when asked to add the correct four-digit number to their returned ballot.
“You are just opening up more opportunities for a ballot to not be counted,” said Gomez, whose organization opposes the ballot measure.
The initiative also would require election officials to verify whether registered voters are US citizens and to publicly report each year the percentage of voters in each county whose citizenship could not be determined.
While those voters will remain on the rolls, DeMaio said: “It will be quite apparent and transparent to the public, ‘Hey, I live in a county where X percent of our voter file has been not been verified for citizenship.’”
Americans back voter ID and proof of citizenship, polls show
It’s already illegal for people who are not US citizens to vote in federal elections, and violators face potential criminal charges and deportation.
Election experts note that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. Last year, for instance, Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security identified “at least” 198 likely noncitizens on the voter rolls out of 13.3 million registered voters. Officials said 170 of them were referred to law enforcement.
At the same time, voter ID and citizenship requirements are broadly popular.
Eighty-three percent of Americans backed requiring voters to show government-issued identification, Pew Research Center found in a 2025 survey. A similar share supported mandating proof of citizenship when individuals first register to vote in a 2024 Gallup poll.
In a sign of its growing currency, the number of citizenship proposals introduced at the state level nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks election-related legislation. So far this year, 15 states have introduced legislation that track
