US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that aims to secure elections by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The order aims to guard against illegal immigrants voting in elections and would require all ballots to be received by Election Day.
The conundrum: The order has a strict list of ways to prove citizenship. So, while it will guard elections against illegitimate voting, it will also stop a lot of legitimate voters from casting ballots.
How does the executive order affect voter registration? Voters will have to provide proof of citizenship and valid photo identification. For most Americans, this will mean a passport or a combo of a Real ID-compliant license and a birth certificate. It also aims to eliminate online voter registration.
Who might this affect? About 140 million Americans do not have a valid passport. To put that into perspective, 153 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election. And close to 69 million women who have changed their names would have difficulty providing matching documents.
Is this enforceable? One provision of the order grants the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the authority, with assistance from the Department of Homeland Security, to issue subpoenas to states for reviewing voter rolls to ensure compliance with federal laws. It also says that failure to comply could lead to a loss of federal funding.
But this is unlikely to fly with the courts. The US Constitution is crystal clear that Congress and the states have jurisdiction when it comes to creating election laws. This is likely to be thrown out by the courts. However, legislation called the SAVE Act was passed by the House on April 10 and contains the same provisions as the executive order, and would make them law if it is passed through the Senate.
But requiring proof of citizenship has been a goal for Republicans for a long time. So, even if the executive order is blocked nationwide, it will likely mean many GOP-led states and counties adopt rigid citizenship requirements anyway.
Are non-citizens voting? Despite levels of illegal immigration rising in the US over the last decade, audits by state officials and political scientists have concluded that it is still rare. A 2022 Georgia investigation found that there were 1,634 incidents of noncitizens potentially attempting to register to vote between 1997 and 2022, but 1,319, or 80.7% of them, happened after 2016. But, and this is important, in none of the cases was the person allowed to vote.
Are the payoffs worth it? Kansas implemented similar strict voting rules requiring proof of citizenship in 2013 in response to its Secretary of State saying that it found 129 non-citizens to have voted or tried to vote since 2000. While that accounted for 0.0007 of the state’s voters, the new rules ended up preventing more than 31,000 eligible US citizens from registering to vote after it was enacted – accounting for 12% of all first-time voter registration attempts in Kansas that year.
