为何要求投票公民身份证明的风险可能超过其益处

Why the risks of requiring proof of citizenship to vote could outweigh the benefits

Analysis by Aaron Blake
34 min ago
PUBLISHED Feb 18, 2026, 2:25 PM ET

A voting booth at the Gates of Heaven Synagogue on November 8, 2022 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

As Republicans’ fortunes have dimmed ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, they’ve increasingly turned a panicked eye toward voting restrictions.

And to many GOP lawmakers, nothing is as urgent as passing the SAVE Act. It’s a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other provisions. The bill recently got its 50th Republican co-sponsor in the Senate — after already passing in the House — and some want party leaders to gut the filibuster to force it through.

It’s a push that makes logical and political sense for the GOP. Polls from 2024 showed support for requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote ranged from 67% to 83% of respondents. Some Republicans have argued that, even though it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote and there’s scant evidence of undocumented immigrants voting, it’s a worthwhile safeguard.

But recent data and history suggest there could be real danger that such restrictions will create bigger problems than they solve.

Specifically, the risk is that they disenfranche people who are legally allowed to vote but either can’t satisfy the restrictions (due to a lack of documentation) or decline to go to the trouble of doing so.

(Critics of the legislation have raised particular concerns about disenfranchising people who lack documents, including voters of color and young people, and women whose married names don’t appear on their birth certificates or passports.)

And given the lack of evidence that noncitizen voting amounts to a significant problem, the risk of doing more harm than good is pretty high.

We have a growing number of cautionary tales, including in a recent effort by some red states to use a federal database to root out noncitizens on their voter rolls.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune over the weekend published an investigation into states that have sought to exclude noncitizen voters using a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

In Missouri, state officials told counties to make voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens by the tool temporarily unable to vote. But the investigation found hundreds of examples of people being incorrectly flagged.

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten found similar things earlier this month.

In Idaho, about 760 people were initially flagged, but only about a dozen cases were later referred to state police for possible criminal charges.

In Texas, state officials have given voters flagged by the system 30 days to verify their citizenship or be dropped from the voter rolls. In one county as of early February, 55 of 84 people flagged by the system hadn’t responded to notices. About half of the rest had been improperly added to voter rolls by administrators, while the other half proved their citizenship.

The numbers of mistakenly flagged voters, while not overwhelming, are quite notably more than the total number of known noncitizen voters in recent federal elections.

The pro-Trump Heritage Foundation keeps a database of voter fraud crimes. It includes fewer than 100 cases of noncitizen voting between 2002 and 2022.

And a study from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice of the 2016 election likewise found just 30 suspected noncitizen votes out of 23 million votes studied.

The situations are dynamic, and voters have chances to verify their eligibility. But the situations in Missouri and Texas raise the prospect that the number of eligible voters who could be incorrectly excluded will be greater than the number of noncitizen voters in recent elections. That’s especially the case in Texas, where the burden falls on the voter to correct any errors.

And the experiences of states that have sought to require proof of citizenship in their elections also speaks to this potential problem.

New Hampshire lawmakers in 2024 passed one of the strictest proof-of-citizenship requirements in the country. A voting rights group later found that, during low-profile elections in the state in 2025, 244 people who tried to vote were turned away.

In Arizona, the state has a bifurcated system in which people who don’t provide proof of citizenship can register to vote in federal elections, but not state elections. A Brennan Center study last year found the resulting group of “federal-only” voters were disproportionately voters of color and significantly less likely to be Republican.

And perhaps the most pertinent example is Kansas.

A 2011 state law requiring proof of citizenship wound up blocking the voter registrations of more than 30,000 US citizens — about 12% of all people seeking to register for the first time.

The law was later struck down by the federal courts. In doing so, a US district court noted that the state had just 39 noncitizens who registered to vote between 1999 and 2013 – while qualifying that many or most of them might have been registered through administrative errors.

So that’s more than 30,000 blocked registrations – to fix a problem that the data pegged to be in the dozens, if that.

The defendant in the lawsuit that ultimately resulted in the law being blocked was Republican Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who had supported it as a state legislator but has since cautioned states and the federal government about the potential risk of requiring proof of citizenship.

“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Schwab told the Associated Press in 2024. “It didn’t work out so well.”