Audrey Folia | Editor-in-Chief
March 13, 2026
Despite the conflict in Iran, a crashing stock market, and a slew of other global conflicts, President Trump has labeled the SAVE America Act the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” before midterm elections.
Following the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), the SAVE America Act seeks to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote by requiring additional documentation. According to President Trump, it’s a “matter in a serious way of national survival,” and, as a result, he believes Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years.”
Ahead of November’s midterm election, the act would change voter ID requirements in order to verify voter eligibility, stemming from President Trump’s concern over election fraud. However, there are fears circulating over this barring citizens from voting as, according to the Campaign Legal Center, “more than 21 million Americans are unable to access the additional documents that would be required to register to vote.” Senior Lucia Bybee felt that though this is “passed under the guise of preventing noncitizens from voting, it’s really just creating another barrier and inconvenience to register to vote to stop the working and lower classes from voting.”
Despite President Trump’s insistence on its passing, other Republicans don’t appear to be certain that this will be the case. Senator John Thune, for example, claimed they would need “an ability to keep 50 Republicans unified pretty much every single vote.” Still, President Trump has announced that he won’t “sign anything into law until the passage of the SAVE America Act” (ABC News).
However, many, including experts, are arguing that non-citizen voting isn’t truly an issue, citing the example of Georgia only finding 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million that were registered to vote. The League of Women Voters thus deemed that the claims that non-citizens are participating in elections are “widely dramatized and false.” Senior Nicole Valdez stated that this makes the act “unnecessary just because there are such few cases of illegal voting.” She added, “it also seems to just benefit Republicans in elections especially since people already go through a lot just to try and vote.”
In total, though many Americans are not inherently opposed to stricter enforcement of identification before registering to vote, the SAVE America Act appears to be rushed before midterm elections and therefore something done to change their outcome instead of truly fixing non-citizen voting.
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