U.S. House passes SAVE America Act (H.R. 22) requiring documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration

On February 11, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, H.R. 22 of the 119th Congress. The bill would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ("Motor Voter") to require every American to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship — typically a birth certificate or passport — when registering to vote or updating voter registration information for federal elections. Online and by-mail registration would, in effect, be eliminated for the population without those documents readily accessible.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that more than 21 million eligible American voters do not have ready access to the required documents, a figure the ACLU's analysis of the bill also cites. The populations most affected — naturalized citizens, voters whose legal names differ from the name on their birth certificate (commonly the case for married women), low-income voters without passports, and voters in rural areas without convenient access to vital-records offices — would face the most significant new barriers to registration.

The bill is the second of a sequence of similar Republican-sponsored documentary-proof-of-citizenship bills. The original "SAVE Act" was advanced by the House in April 2025; the "SAVE America Act" (H.R. 22) passed the House in February 2026 with substantially the same documentary-proof framework. A separate, more sweeping bill — the proposed "Make Elections Great Again" (MEGA) Act — was introduced in January 2026 and would extend the SAVE America Act's restrictions with a federal ban on mail voting, repeal of the Motor Voter law, mandated voter-roll purges, defunding of nonpartisan voter-registration drives, and a ban on ranked-choice voting; the MEGA Act has not advanced to a House vote as of May 2026.

The SAVE America Act is now before the U.S. Senate, where debate is ongoing per Brennan Center reporting from mid-May 2026. The bill has not been signed into law. This entry records the legislative act that has occurred — House passage of the SAVE America Act — rather than the proposed MEGA Act, which is captured here as immediate context but is a separate, not-yet-enacted abuse that would warrant its own entry if it advances.

The constitutional posture is distinct from contemporaneous elections-related actions by the executive: Congress is the proper actor for federal-elections legislation under the Elections Clause (Art. I, Sec. 4). The abuse recorded here is therefore in the content of the legislation — its design to suppress eligible voters — rather than in any procedural overreach. The disparate-impact pattern of documentary requirements falling hardest on protected-class populations is the basis for the discriminatory-policy mapping.

Updates

2026-07-22 — House passed budget reconciliation framework bundling SAVE America Act anti-voting measures [7, 8]

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 216-214 on a $95 billion budget reconciliation framework that bundles SAVE America Act anti-voting measures with Pentagon and Iran war funding, tariff relief for farmers, and congressional stock trading restrictions. The reconciliation vehicle bypasses the Senate filibuster threshold that had repeatedly blocked standalone passage of the SAVE Act in the Senate. Rather than mandating documentary citizenship requirements directly, the package includes $10 billion in election-related grants to coax states into adopting SAVE Act-style requirements. The bill's fate in the Senate remained unclear at the time of passage.