The SAVE America Act would require potential voters to in-person present a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Editor’s note: This story is part of CNY Decides, a collaboration between Central Current and WAER to demystify the political process and bring you the stories and information you’ll remember in the voting booth in 2026. Click here to read, watch and listen to other installments in the collaboration.

Members of the U.S. Congress are campaigning for reelection in the 2026 midterm elections, while debating lighting rod legislation that could reshape the way Americans vote in November.

For months, President Donald Trump has pressured Senate Republicans to vote on the SAVE America Act. The bill would require voters to present a valid photo identification to register to vote, and present proof of citizenship at the ballot box. The act would also restrict mail-in ballots, with limited exemptions for voters who are ill, disabled, in the military or traveling.

The bill in February sailed through the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, but has since stalled in the U.S. Senate, where GOP leaders lack the votes to pass the law.

Trump and Congressional Republicans have framed the SAVE Act as a common-sense solution to voter fraud. However, neither the president nor his allies in Congress have furnished evidence supporting their claims that noncitizens’ votes have any material impact on American elections.

Many Democrats, nonpartisan political scientists and civil liberties advocates believe the SAVE Act’s true purpose is something more sinister: suppressing tens of millions of Americans’ right to vote.

Luke Perry, a professor of political science at Utica University, said in an interview with Central Current that electoral fraud is a regular occurrence in many other countries, but not in the US.

“Political science scholars as well as journalists have documented for many years that voter fraud is not a major issue in American elections, and we are very fortunate that that is the case,” Perry said. “A lot of countries struggle with this. We do not.”

Perry pointed to Hungary, where Trump-backed autocrat Victor Orban recently lost in a landslide election after nearly 16 years in power, as an example of a country where government actions have in the past compromised elections. 

Trump has complained about voter fraud for nearly a decade, even alleging millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election he won. But America’s tradition of free and fair elections, Perry said, is exemplary on the international scale — and one of the strongest cornerstones of the American political system.

“Unfortunately, it’s become a hot button political issue. I think that’s the case, because obviously, President Trump wasn’t reelected,” Perry said, referring to the president’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election. “I think he has it in his mind that voter fraud and types of voting, such as voting by mail, was the main reason. And again, there’s no empirical evidence for that.”

Rep. John Mannion, who represents New York’s 22nd Congressional District, said he believes Trump is “trying to sow doubt into people’s minds regarding the validity” of U.S. elections. Mannion accused the president of being afraid of accountability that could follow the election of Democratic majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. 

Rep. John Mannion has said he’d advocate against the passage of the SAVE America Act, which he believes could hurt voting access in the United States. Credit: Surya Vaidy | Central Current

Critics of the SAVE Act have pointed to a bevy of local, state, and national studies which have found that voter fraud is not a significant problem in American elections. After the SAVE Act’s introduction in February, libertarian thinktank the Cato Institute issued a report that concluded voter fraud was “virtually non-existent.”

Among the new restrictions to voter registration and identification, the SAVE Act would instruct states to purge noncitizens from voter rolls. But the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank, highlighted how several states have already done this in recent months by comparing state voter rolls to citizenship data.

In Utah, the home state of SAVE Act sponsor Sen. Mike Lee, Republican state officials spent months assessing that state’s voter rolls, and eventually found one registered noncitizen who had never cast a vote. A 2024 investigation in Georgia found 20 noncitizens registered to vote of 8.2 million registered voters; Montana in January identified 23 possible noncitizens of roughly 785,000 registered voters; and a Louisiana audit last year found 390 registered noncitizens out of 2.9 million registrants, though only 79 of those noncitizens had voted in elections.

The biggest problem facing the American electoral process, Perry argued, isn’t too much participation from illegal voters but a lack of participation from legal voters.

“It’s not good when you have 35% to 40% turnout in midterm elections like the one we’re going to have this fall, that means the vast majority of people who are eligible aren’t voting,” Perry said. 

Unlike most modern democracies, the U.S. does not have a national election holiday. That makes voting more difficult, Perry said, because working voters have to find time outside of their workday to get to the ballot. While some voters may be able to take time out of work to vote, low-income voters likely don’t have that option. Voters are assigned to specific polling stations, but may not have the resources to get there, Perry said.

By further restricting the voting process, the SAVE Act would reduce an already dismal voter turnout, Perry said. 

“So I think it’s worth everybody considering what is best for democracy when it comes to voting, and whether it makes more sense in terms of strengthening our democracy to make it simpler for people to vote, or whether to make it more complicated and more difficult,” Perry said.

Despite his misgivings about the SAVE Act’s potential impacts, Perry believes the Senate is unlikely to pass the measure. That’s because Senate Republicans need 60 votes to invoke cloture, which would end debate on the bill and allow its introduction for a final vote that can be won by a simple majority of 50 votes.

Republicans have the option to eliminate that 60vote requirement, known as the filibuster. Trump has demanded his Senate allies kill the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, but Republicans lack the internal support to take that action. 

Though some House Democrats supported the SAVE Act, Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress appear united against the bill, and have yet to waver despite months of mounting pressure from their Republican peers and the president, who went so far as to tell Republican congressmembers ahead of Easter to pass the law “for Jesus.”

If Senate Republicans fail to push the SAVE Act through their chamber and onto Trump’s desk, the president could still try to issue similar legislation through executive orders which would likely invite immediate lawsuits in opposition, Perry said.

Many Congressional Democrats, such as Mannion, have used the stalemate in the senate to draw public attention to the legislation and amplify their concerns that the bill will disenfranchise legal voters including women, people of color, and low-income citizens. 

The law would require citizens to, in-person, show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, but only about half of American citizens have a passport, and many lack access to their birth certificate, Mannion told Central Current. The majority of women who marry in the U.S. change their surname, according to The Center for American Progress, which found that about 69 million American women have names that do not match their birth certificates. 

“This is something that’s clearly going to impact women who have been married, people with hyphenated names, people who have changed addresses, people who have been adopted,” Mannion said. “… So I’m opposed to it, I’m going to continue to speak the truth on it.”

Kailee Buller, a Republican challenging Mannion, believes the SAVE Act is a common-sense improvement to the American voting process. Buller in 2025 worked under Trump as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief of staff. 

In an interview with Central Current, Buller said she would be “working night and day” to pass the SAVE Act if she were currently in Congress. Asked if voter fraud was a significant issue in American elections, Buller said “I think we have to look at it to really know.”

“But what is controversial about bringing ID to the voting ballot? I literally got ID’ed to buy a glass of wine last night at a bar,” Buller said. “So, I don’t view it as controversial in terms of doing something so common sense, and I just can’t understand what’s so controversial about it.”

Central Current asked both candidates whether voters in New York’s 22nd Congressional District will see U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at polling stations in November as another aspect of Trump’s push to nationalize elections. 

Since the start of his second term, the president has deployed ICE to various Democrat-led cities around the country. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not ruled out deploying agents to polling stations in the midterm elections. The government also deployed the federal immigration agents to airports with the stated purpose of assisting TSA agents affected by a recent DHS funding shutdown.

“That’s the first time I’m hearing anything about that,” Buller said, “I’d have to think about that more.”

Mannion said ICE deployment in the midterms is a realistic concern, one that he and his Democratic colleagues are already organizing against. He said Democrats are gameplanning to “take on litigative actions” to prevent ICE from being at polling places. 

Perry, the political scientist, agreed with Mannion that the deployment of ICE agents at voting stations is a legitimate concern. That development, along with the SAVE Act, constitutes what Perry called “the receding of a large wave” in American history that for 200 years progressed toward a more inclusive voting process.

What began as a system in which only a relatively small segment of the population could participate in elections (white, religious, male property owners), gradually expanded to include more and more citizens in the electoral process, Perry said. 

Now, every major group of Americans, other than people in prison and people convicted of felonies, is eligible to participate in the electoral process.

“So you think of this history, 200 years, and the current moment where, for me, it seems like it’s really political self-serving reasons that certain political groups are trying to change the way our elections work and make it more difficult for some people to vote,” Perry said. “I think that’s quite tragic.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...