The National Voting Rights Act nominally makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in American elections, but the NVRA’s requirement that voters check a box affirming that they are citizens is easily circumvented and difficult to enforce. The SAVE America Act, recently passed by the House of Representatives and now stalled in the Senate, would rectify this issue, requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote and purging noncitizens from voter rolls. While Democrats deride the legislation as racist, surveys show that Americans actually support measures to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in and influence the outcome of our elections.

The latest poll, from Rasmussen Reports, found that a majority of likely voters are concerned about noncitizens voting in American elections: 55% of voters say that it’s likely that noncitizens vote in American elections (including 32% who say that it’s very likely), while roughly one third (34%) of respondents say that it’s either not very likely or not at all likely that noncitizens cast ballots in American elections.

Previously, a Pew Research Center survey found that 83% of Americans (including 95% of Republican voters and over 70% of Democrat voters) support mandatory photo ID for voting, while a Gallup poll published in late 2024 found similar results: 84% of Americans (including 98% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 84% of Independent voters) support requiring a photo ID in order to vote, and 83% (including 96% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats, and 84% of Independent voters) support requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

The majority of Americans are likely correct in their belief that noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. A 2025 Iowa Secretary of State’s office audit, for example, found that at least 35 noncitizens had illegally cast ballots in the 2024 general election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that as many as 100,000 noncitizens likely registered to vote in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Department of State official Jonathan Marks testified that noncitizens voluntarily told the state that they had illegally voted over 500 times in elections held between 2000 and 2017.

A previous review of Georgia’s voter rolls found that over 1,600 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote in the swing state between 1997 and 2002, while Virginia found that noncitizens had voted nearly 7,500 times between 1988 and 2017. North Carolina voter rolls showed almost 1,500 registered voters who were evidently noncitizens at the time of casting their ballots and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) admitted to accidentally mailing postcards urging 31,000 noncitizens to vote in the 2022 midterm elections.

Over the course of 2025 and the first few months of 2026, at least 30 foreign nationals have been criminally charged with illegally voting in U.S. elections, including Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez, Jose Ceballos-Armendariz, James Ross Wightman, Jacqueline Dianne Wallace, Michael Nana Baako, Francis Bagnall, Leonardo Lleras-Rodriguez, Rogelio Mejorada-Lopez, Yaakov M. Schulman, Mayra Alejandra Lopez Morales, and Abel Hernandez-Labra, among others.

More recently, Democrats brokered a court-sanctioned deal allowing over 73,000 improperly-registered voters to remain on North Carolina’s voter rolls, including those who were unable to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security numbers.

The SAVE America Act would not only require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting a ballot, but would also require states to regularly cross-reference their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to ensure that noncitizens are not registered to vote and to allow DHS to identify noncitizens who illegally register to vote.