Amy Burgans wrote down some notes for a town hall recently in her northwestern Nevada community of Douglas County. They were thorough — more than would appear on a handful of index cards. Bullet point by bullet point, detail by statistic, they weighed the merits of federal election legislation that has consumed the work of the Senate and the focus of President Trump.
With those in mind, “The question we need to ask is, does this law make sense considering the barriers that it will create for people to register to vote, versus the amount of fraud that we are trying to eliminate?” suggested Burgans, the chief election official in her county. She answered in the negative: “not as it is currently written or in the manner that it is being rolled out.”
The SAVE America Act is characterized nationally in the rhetoric of partisan advantage and political hyperbole. “If we repeat the same mistake (of the past) and only run on tax cuts, and not give the people election integrity reform, we will see a resurgence of ‘The Squad,’ and we will have a repeat of 2018, and that means our president will be impeached on day one of 2027,” the activist Scott Pressler told a meeting of congressional Republicans in February. Alternatively, Democratic Senate leader Charles Schumer calls the bill “Jim Crow 2.0,” despite analysis even from the right that it would hinder Republican voter registration.
Local election officials, though, work in a different world: where elections are actually run, not where politicians run on elections as a campaign plank. In this world, the SAVE America Act is described in terms of needs judged against available facts, of technicalities, of practicalities — the language of “commonsense government,” for which a new round of candidates for high office seems to clamor every two years.
“How do you take something as complicated as elections, and take that complication and still somehow keep it punchy?” asked Forrest Lehman, the elections director of Lycoming County, Pa., which forms a triangle above and between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. “It’s not easy.”
To officials such as Burgans and Lehman, good-faith discussion is possible about the role of the federal government in setting minimum nationwide standards for the election process. But the hangups about the SAVE America Act end up being twofold: One, the bill is disproportionate to the main problem it’s purported to solve, noncitizen voting; and two, judged even by its own standards of ensuring election integrity, it fails on some of the details.
Is a ‘hammer’ really necessary?
Josh Daniels was the clerk/auditor of Utah County, Utah’s second-largest, where he oversaw election administration. He’s now the Director for Election Policy at the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, from where he has more of a coast-to-coast view of how different states run their elections. He worries that the SAVE America Act — whose chief Senate sponsor is a Utahn, Mike Lee — “would basically nuke Utah’s vote-by-mail system” if it were enacted as-is. Yet he isn’t hesitant to criticize certain states, such as Oregon (another vote-by-mail state), for lax voter verification standards.
“This is a gap that needs to be closed,” he says. “Current proposals seem to take a hammer to it, though” — far too much oomph for the circumstances.
Finding that appropriate instrument is how Lee’s bill is revealed to misdiagnose and mistreat the issue, according to the sources that Declare consulted for this story. In short, the legislation would mandate a new proof-of-citizenship standard for voter registration, and a new photo ID standard for voting itself, across the United States. What qualifies as acceptable documentation is a concern in the details. For the purposes of understanding how much the bill is needed to prevent noncitizen voting, an overview of current state laws and voting statistics provides a good-enough starting point.
First, 36 states have some sort of voter ID requirement, of which 24 specifically have a photo ID requirement. The strictness varies: In some states, a voter who fails to present the required ID at the time of casting a ballot must take certain follow-up steps for his or her vote to count; in others, election officials will investigate further after Election Day to determine eligibility, with no further action from the voter necessary. Describing state voter ID laws as a “patchwork” is appropriate.
The same cannot be said for proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration — because there isn’t much quilt to begin with. In just three states, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, such blanket requirements are active — in the case of Arizona, they apply to non-federal elections only — while they’ve been entangled in court or not implemented in a few others.
And, finally, both the following are true: One, noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal, with harsh penalties for offenders, under a 1996 immigration law, and two, “noncitizen voting audits” are sporadic. States review voter data like changes of address or name as part of routine maintenance of their rolls; they have certain standards for doing so under the National Voter Registration Act.
Second, with this the status quo, noncitizen voting has been found only by the handful in states that have investigated it, out of many millions of registered voters state-by-state. Kyle Koenen of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has highlighted findings from Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, and Utah. Declare has done so from Ohio and Texas. A common Republican critique has been that these are all red states. Burgans, the Nevada local election official, noted an audit undertaken by Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, before her presentation to her constituents: The audit found 16 “credible” cases of noncitizen voting in the November 2024 election, out of 5.7 million ballots cast. Benson, a Democrat, is running for governor this year.
“If you talk to election administrators and you ask us, ‘How worried are you about noncitizens voting,’ the vast majority of us, we’re gonna say, ‘That is not a major problem,’” Lehman, the local Pennsylvania election official, said. “To me, the extent of it is more like a data cleanup issue” — in other words, an issue of preventing and resolving accidental registrations by noncitizens, more than one of preventing noncitizens who intentionally register to vote and then cast ballots.
A more responsive approach
Lehman and Daniels are in agreement, in fact, that a more productive use of government attention on this matter — whether from the federal or state level — would be to provide election offices with more official data to help keep atop their rolls. Lehman mentioned deceased voters as a larger challenge than noncitizen voters in his state, for example, owing to the lack of sources that he’s authorized to use; the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File would help. Daniels wondered why the Trump administration didn’t take a victory lap for enhancing and allowing election offices to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database (SAVE, different from the Act) free of charge, as another tool for checking voter eligibility.
Perhaps to Lehman’s earlier point — not a thing about these modest-sounding ideas is “punchy.” They rather have all the flavor of distilled water.
It’s worth pausing here to note a difference between solving a problem based on data, and solving one based on mistrust of the election system — even if, in the instance of the SAVE America Act, the mistrust being stoked is based itself in part on cherry-picked data. “[I]ncredibly narrow races show just how important it is that our elections run smoothly, fairly, and that only — only — legitimate votes are counted,” Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick said during weekend debate on the Senate floor the weekend before last. “Right now, we cannot pretend that all elections in America meet this standard.” As evidence, however, he cited three individual cases of noncitizen voting, one each in three different states — to make a point about the trustworthiness of congressional elections decided by thousands of votes.
Say, though, the justification for the SAVE America Act was about a perception of right versus wrong, or fair versus unfair, instead of a response to statistics demonstrating vulnerabilities in the election process. A recent CBS News/YouGov survey found that 66 percent of American adults support proof of citizenship for voter registration, and 80 percent support photo ID for voting, not just general “voter ID.”
Even with this as context, the legislation arguably undermines and fails to meet its own voter-integrity goals. Daniels wondered why expired passports, for instance, wouldn’t count as sufficient proof of citizenship to register to vote, if the holder evidently demonstrated citizenship to obtain the passport in the first place. He also suggested that Congress could appropriate money to states for enhanced driver’s licenses, which act as both proof of identification and of citizenship. Burgans expressed concerns about the immediate implementation of the legislation, which would take effect on the day the president signs it — creating a chaotic process for localities to develop new registration workflows smack dab in the middle of an election year.
Lehman used a thought experiment: Even if every voter had to re-register to vote — which the SAVE America Act does not mandate, but which some critics have adopted as a talking point — what he calls “data gremlins” would inevitably reemerge in voter rolls. Giant multiples more of voters relocate, get married, or pass away, for example, than noncitizens register to vote (a conclusion that’s possible to reach even with incomplete data about the latter). Election officials stay atop all of it; the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud map shows as much. Yet noncitizen voting is the topic among all of them which receives the most scrutiny, from congressional Republicans and the president.
That cohort previously attacked Democrats’ own federal election reform proposal, the For the People Act, as a Washington “takeover” of elections. It could behoove everyone inside the Capitol to first ask if states and localities have things under control — or at least to start with things their officials say they actually need.