What’s Really Behind Republicans’ Push for Proof of Citizenship?
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has catapulted some of the most inane election conspiracy theories we’ve heard in recent years back into the national spotlight. One of those theories is the perennial idea that large numbers of noncitizens are voting. Conservatives will have you believe there is rampant illegal voting going on in immigrant communities — and that Democrats are shielding it.
Republicans have invested so heavily in this idea that Texas Congressman Chip Roy (R) reintroduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on the first day of the new Congress, signaling a clear Republican priority. The bill requires individuals to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, among other provisions. It was first introduced last year and nearly passed as part of a spending bill before being dropped at the last minute to avoid a government shutdown.
The SAVE Act seems, at first glance, sensible. Why shouldn’t voters have to prove their eligibility when registering to vote? The answer is that these requirements stop eligible voters from accessing the polls. Nearly one in 10 eligible voters don’t have easy access to passports, birth certificates, naturalization papers, or other documents that prove citizenship.
More than that, requiring proof of citizenship has a chilling effect on voter registration. As a practical matter, adding this step can deter people from registering altogether if it means visiting a safety deposit box, sifting through important files at home, or asking family members to mail documents. Replacing faded or missing documents can take more effort and time, and the cost of acquiring new documents for the purpose of voting could be considered a poll tax.
Instances of noncitizen voting are also incredibly rare. Both left-leaning and conservative organizations have found rates of noncitizen voting to be near zero.
Experts on noncitizen voting have called legislation like the SAVE Act a “solution in search of a problem.” And yet, Republicans continue to push with increasing fervor for documentary proof of citizenship.
Last year, New Hampshire’s Republican state government passed a proof of citizenship requirement for new voters. In Virginia, Iowa and Alabama, state officials purged voters who were suspected of being noncitizens based on outdated information, forcing them to produce evidence of their citizenship to rejoin voter rolls shortly before the 2024 election. And in just the first month of 2025, Republican lawmakers in seven states have introduced 16 bills requiring proof of citizenship.
The rhetoric calls to mind an alien invasion, with hordes of foreigners — no doubt dark skinned — flooding communities and ballot boxes while some Democratic overlord cackles behind closed doors. The language is intended to scare, and it succeeds.
So why are Republicans exerting so much time and energy on a problem that doesn’t exist with a solution that could disenfranchise millions?
One reason is simple Machiavellian politics. Voters who don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship are more likely to be people of color and political independents. With people of color leaning Democrat and political independents swaying outcomes in tight elections, reducing their numbers could be a way to reach victory.
Another reason, inextricably linked to the first, is xenophobia masking as election security.
The Unholy Alliance: How Election Security Fears Feed Anti-Immigration Extremism
Republicans are tying election integrity to the southern border and playing on fears of demographic outnumbering — a dog whistle for white supremacy if ever there was one — to push for proof of citizenship.
Congressman Roy’s press release announcing the SAVE Act is a particularly telling example. “The SAVE Act,” it says, “would thwart Democrat efforts to cement one-party rule.” In an attached one-pager explaining the bill, Roy writes, “Radical progressive Democrats are taking drastic steps to fundamentally remake America through open borders, the release of millions of illegal aliens into our communities, and by waging a full-scale assault on election integrity laws.”
With those two statements, the Republican argument behind proof of citizenship becomes startlingly clear. The rhetoric calls to mind an alien invasion, with hordes of foreigners — no doubt dark skinned — flooding communities and ballot boxes while some Democratic overlord cackles behind closed doors. The language is intended to scare, and it succeeds.
The convergence of election security concerns with hardline anti-immigration ideology has been driven in recent years by Cleta Mitchell, a long-time Republican lawyer and election denier who helped Trump challenge the 2020 election results. Since then, she founded the Election Integrity Network (EIN), where activists monitor elections and scour voter rolls, and chaired the Public Interest Legal Fund (PILF), which has brought numerous lawsuits trying to purge voter rolls.
In 2024, Mitchell launched the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a network of almost 90 organizations joined together to “ensure the enactment and administration of laws and practices at all levels of government to prevent noncitizen registration and voting.” Issue One — a crosspartisan pro-democracy nonprofit — has described the coalition instead as a body that pushes the myth of noncitizen voting using “scare tactics” to sow doubt in elections. That doubt then “lay[s] the groundwork” for partisan actors to challenge election results when they don’t like the outcome.
One of Only Citizens’ member organizations is America First Legal Foundation, founded by Trump immigration advisor and now deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. During the first Trump administration, Miller was the architect behind the child separation policy that ultimately separated nearly 3,000 migrant children from their parents with no plan in place for reuniting them.
Another is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated as a hate group with ties to white supremacists and eugenicists. FAIR has long called for limiting legal as well as illegal immigration, with the ultimate goal of keeping the United States a mostly-white country.
Only Citizens’ efforts are paying off, too. A September 2024 poll found that 67% of respondents have seen social media content about noncitizens voting illegally in elections. Because social media platforms have a financial incentive to prioritize the most provocative content, those platforms were found to be “directing stories about noncitizen voting to the population already primed to believe or be angered by those stories.” A separate poll conducted just weeks before the 2024 election found that nearly half of Americans were concerned about noncitizen voting, including 83% of Republicans.
Repeating History: ‘Election Integrity’ Crusades Are Not New
The myth of undocumented immigrants being imported to influence elections is as old as racialized xenophobia itself. According to Ron Hayduk, a noncitizen voting expert and professor at San Francisco State University, voting eligibility was not tied to citizenship, but rather gender, wealth and race from the colonial period to the early 1800s. Noncitizen voting — so long as it was done by propertied white male Christians — was widely practiced and largely uncontroversial.
When concerns over noncitizen voting arose, they were often linked to fears of diminished power among economic elites. For example, the decline of property requirements in voting led some to consider prohibiting noncitizen voting to limit the political influence of poor immigrant men. And in the first half of the 19th century, southerners were more likely to oppose immigrant suffrage as newer immigrants tended to oppose slavery.
But with rising immigration from Ireland and Germany, fears of insidious foreign influence increased, too. As Hayduk writes in his book Democracy for All, “The kinds of nativist concerns expressed at this time are strikingly similar to those of contemporary nativists: immigrants were uneducated, would steal jobs from ‘real’ Americans, would become paupers and live off of taxpayers’ money, were immoral, and would undermine the civil and social institutions of the country.”
These fears peaked following a large influx of darker-skinned southern Europeans and Jewish eastern Europeans between 1880 and the 1910s, culminating in the elimination of noncitizen voting by the end of the Roaring ‘20s. The disenfranchisement of immigrants coincided with other restrictions implemented ostensibly to prevent fraud in the post-Reconstruction era. Those included literacy tests, poll taxes, restrictive residency requirements, voter registration procedures and more onerous naturalization processes. The effect was keeping out poor voters and voters of color.
The push for proof of citizenship is both self-serving and convenient.
The early 20th century also had its own version of proof of citizenship reform, which required new citizens to show their naturalization papers in order to vote. The New York Herald reported at the time that “many persons will be deprived of their vote, as their papers are either worn out, lost, or mislaid.” This turned out to be true: voter participation rates among working class naturalized immigrants declined.
The Progressive Era reformers who championed these policies claimed they were preventing rampant fraud and corruption. And when voter participation rates fell, the justification was that the reforms had worked to eliminate fraudulent ballots. But the reformers were typically nativist elites who were in political competition against urban party machines with strong ties to working class immigrants. According to Hayduk, fraud allegations “originated in muckraking magazines…whose writers were native-born, white, Protestant, middle- and upper-class Progressive reformers. The accounts were largely anecdotal and based on accounts of highly motivated observers and participants.”
The parallels between the early 20th century and now are striking. Immigrants make up approximately 14.3% of the U.S. population, the highest since 1910 and nearing the 1890 record of 14.8%. Nativism is in full force. The robber barons of today have an outsized influence over commerce, politics and information. And politicians are turning to the age-old justification of fraud to disenfranchise eligible voters.
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How Voter Suppression Aligns with Republican Goals
Ultimately, Republicans care about winning. In September, when a data glitch was revealed to be coding 98,000 registered Arizonans as having shown proof of citizenship when they hadn’t, the Arizona GOP said they should be able to vote anyway. The state party had spent years defending the state’s restrictive documentary proof of citizenship law. So why the sudden change of heart? Most of the affected 98,000 voters were registered Republicans.
The push for proof of citizenship is both self-serving and convenient. It depresses turnout among voters of color, grants Republican candidates opportunity to question election results when they lose, and bolsters the immigration agenda that energizes Trump’s base. With the aid of social media giants who have enormous influence over how people think, harmful myths about imported votes will continue to proliferate, forcing eligible voters to pay the price.