To help journalists report on the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections, the Institute partnered with the Bipartisan Policy Center for a midterm coverage briefing.
BPC Elections Project Director Wren Orey led the briefing, offering insights into challenges that elections officials are facing this election season. Orey oversees BPC’s election administration policy and researches reforms to improve the security, accessibility, and trustworthiness of elections.
With three federal election bills under consideration by Congress — the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, and the Make Elections Great Again Act — it can be hard for reporters to keep track. But Orey notes that the throughline in all three bills is the requirement for voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote.
Despite these and other efforts by the Trump administration meant to curtail noncitizen voting, Orey noted that noncitizen voting and registration is already illegal — and research shows that it’s also very rare.
Data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which allows state, local, and federal agencies to check citizenship and immigration status, indicates that only 0.04% of registered voters are noncitizens.
Proposed legislation would require anyone registering to vote to provide additional documentation like birth certificates, which are not uniform across states, plus photo IDs. Orey and the BPC argue that the complications arising from these requirements puts the onus on voters, rather than government bodies that already track citizenship.
Further complicating matters, if documentary proof of citizenship is required for voting, Republicans could be at a greater disadvantage than Democrats.
Go deeper: Learn more about covering the election workforce. For additional elections resources, click here.