States Push for Proof of Citizenship in Voting: Surge in Bills, Laws, and Ongoing Challenges

BY ELLA ADAMS

The topic of citizenship and voting is the “hottest” across all of the issues tracked by the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Elections and Redistricting Team, according to associate director Katy Owens Hubler. 

The team tracked 191 bills introduced this year in 42 states that touch on the topic of citizenship or voting in a variety of ways, Hubler said Tuesday in Boston. The tracked bills include legislation that would require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering.

“If you’re wondering why we call it the hottest topic, it’s because it was the largest topic that we tracked in our database this year,” Hubler said. “We track about 3,000 election administration bills every year, some years, more than others. This was a pretty big year.”

Across the country, Hubler said, some states have passed constitutional amendments permitting only citizens to vote in state and local elections, while others have made non-citizen denotations on driver’s licenses. 

“Part of the increase at the state level has been driven by the increase at the federal level. So the discussion of the ‘SAVE Act’ in Congress last year — even very early, I think it started in April or May — that’s when we started hearing from our members that this was bubbling up in their states,” said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors.

The SAVE Act, which has cleared the U.S. House, would require individuals to prove U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections.

The interest in requiring proof of citizenship has been alive for years, Cohen said, referencing a 2004 Arizona ballot measure that required proof of citizenship upon voter registration. New Hampshire, Louisiana and Wyoming have all recently passed similar requirements into law.

New Hampshire’s 2024 law requires voters to provide documentary proof of age, domicile, citizenship and identity, according to New Hampshire Rep. Robert Lynn. Documents can include a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers. 

“Whether there were significant problems or not, sort of depends on, candidly, who you’re asking,” Lynn said when asked how the implementation of the law panned out in local elections in 2025. 

“From my perspective, I don’t think that there really were problems. Were there a few people who didn’t provide the appropriate documentation? Yeah, that’s true, and they didn’t vote. But I guess my take was, it was relatively minor,” the New Hampshire Republican said. A 2025 law in New Hampshire, Lynn added, requires proof of citizenship when requesting absentee ballots, which the 2024 law did not address.

New Hampshire is one of six states that are not subject to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a 1993 law that requires states to use a standard form to register voters for federal elections. The form requires those registering to swear “under penalty of perjury” that they’re U.S. citizens, and does not require other proof of citizenship. States like New Hampshire that allowed same-day voter registration at the time of the law’s enactment were exempt.

But the Granite State, along with other states that have passed laws requiring proof of citizenship, still faces litigation from voter advocacy groups. 

In some cases, like in Arizona, litigation can ultimately reconfigure state voting systems, Cohen said. Lawsuits challenged Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship almost immediately, and almost a decade later, the Supreme Court found that while the NVRA allows states to develop their own registration forms, the federal form must suffice for federal elections, according to Cohen.

Arizona now has a bifurcated voting system, Cohen continued, in which people who use the National Voter Registration Form can vote in federal elections, but only people who satisfactorily use the state form can vote in state and local elections.

Keeping local election officials in mind is essential when thinking about altering systems of voting to include two different types of forms, said Michelle Tassinari, director and legal counsel of the Elections Division at the Massachusetts Secretary of State. Massachusetts does not require proof of citizenship when registering to vote, but maintains voter lists using the annual municipal census.

While Massachusetts maintains a database for all 351 local election officials, those local individuals are responsible for processing voter registrations. Something like a bifurcated system would present resource and technological challenges in Massachusetts, Tassinari said, both due to manpower and paper availability. 

States are also trying to understand a recently overhauled federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) interface, which is meant to help state and local governments more efficiently verify citizenship status of voters. But it’s not “a push-button solution,” Cohen said. 

“As SAVE is expanding the amount of data they have on Americans, states are sort of experimenting more and we’re still kind of waiting to hear from those efforts what the numbers look like,” Cohen said. States have been struggling to use the resource because of cost issues, manual issues and the fact that local election officials don’t have individual “alien ID numbers.”

In recent months, Cohen said, the federal government has eliminated the cost of using the interface for election offices, introduced a bulk upload functionality and integrated with the Social Security Administration, though only a handful of states collect the full nine digits of Social Security numbers and therefore have the capacity to use it. 

According to Cohen, the Department of Homeland Security is working on enabling the database to work with just the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

“The last four is going to change a lot for election offices. It’s going to certainly open the universe of states that are able to leverage this,” Cohen said. “But last four is not unique either, and so there is still going to be a level of validation that is required.”