Congressional Republicans are pushing voting legislation that's backed by President Donald Trump and would require voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship in order to register for federal elections. Obtaining those records and paying for them may not be as easy as the bill’s promoters make it sound.
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Customers stand in line to get birth and death certificates at the Columbus Public Health Department in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday, March, 10, 2026. Joshua Bogdan, who faced new hurdles while registering to vote last year, poses in front of City Hall in Portsmouth, N.H., Tuesday, March 10, 2026. Joshua Bogdan, who faced new hurdles while registering to vote last year, poses in front of City Hall in Portsmouth, N.H., Tuesday, March 10, 2026. Voters wait in line and fill out their ballots at a voting center at Lumen Field Event Center on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, in Seattle. Voters wait in line and fill out their ballots at a voting center at Lumen Field Event Center on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, in Seattle. COLUMBUS, Ohio — Joshua Bogdan was born and raised in the United States. The only time the New Hampshire resident has left the country was for a day and a half in seventh grade, when he went to Canada to see Niagara Falls.The 31-year-old arrived at his voting place in Portsmouth and handed the poll worker his driver’s license, just as he had done in other towns when arriving to vote. She said that would no longer do., which took effect for the first time during town elections in 2025, Bogdan would need a passport or his birth certificate because he had moved and needed to reregister at his new address. A scramble ensued, turning the voting process that he had always found fun and invigorating into a nerve-wracking game of beat the clock. “I didn’t know that anything had officially changed walking in there,” he said. “And then being told that I had to provide a passport that I’ve never had or a birth certificate that’s usually tucked away somewhere safe just to cast my vote — which I’ve done before — it was frustrating.”Bogdan’s experience in New Hampshire is a glimpse into the future for potentially millions of voters across the country. That is if Republican voting legislation beingby President Donald Trump passes Congress and a “show your papers” law is put in place in time for the November elections.last month on a mostly party-line basis. Republicans say it would improve election integrity. Trump has called its safeguards common sense. The bill is scheduled to come upRepublican messaging has mostly highlighted a less divisive provision in the bill that would require voters to show a photo ID, but the mandate for people to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections is likely to have the most wide-ranging consequences. Noncitizens already are prohibited from voting in federal elections, anda decade ago and turned into a debacle that eventually was blocked by the courts after more than 30,000 eligible citizens were prevented from registering.Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO at the Fair Elections Center, said the legislation’s strict documentation requirements could move the U.S. “in the opposite direction” of representative democracy. “If this bill passes, it would deny millions of eligible Americans their fundamental freedom to vote,” she said in an email. “This includes millions of people who make up your communities, including married women, people of color and voters who live in rural areas.” The list of qualifying documents in the SAVE Act for proving citizenship appears long, but many of them come with qualifiers.-compliant driver’s license would have to indicate that “the applicant is a citizen,” but not all do. Only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer the type of enhanced REAL IDs that explicitly indicate U.S. citizenship. Standard driver’s licenses, generally available to both citizens and noncitizens, often do not include a citizenship indicator. Some states, including Ohio, have recently added them. While military ID cards are listed as qualifying documents under the act, they will not suffice on their own. The bill says a military ID must be accompanied by a military “record of service” that indicates the person’s birthplace was in the U.S. A DD214, the current standard-issue certificate of release or discharge for all military service branches, does not currently fulfill that requirement. According to the Pentagon, that document only lists where someone lived at points of entry and discharge and a person’s current home of record. It does not list where someone was born.For most provisions, the SAVE Act contains no phase-in period that would give voters and local election offices time to adjust. If passed by Congress and signed by Trump, its documentary proof-of-citizenship mandate would apply immediately, meaning it would be in place for this year’s midterm elections. That could lead to a rush to obtain documents by those who want to register or need to reregister. A 2025 University of Maryland study estimates thatwho are eligible to vote do not have or have easy access to documents to prove their citizenship, including nearly 10% of Democrats, 7% of Republicans and 14% of people unaffiliated with either major party. A passport would most effectively meet the requirement, but only about half of American adults have one, according to the State Department, and the SAVE Act requires the passport to be current. An expired one does not count.that had long helped relieve pressure at the department. Government libraries, post offices, county clerks and others still provide the service. It takes four weeks to six weeks to get a passport, according to the department’s website, excluding mailing time. A new passport costs $165 for adults while renewals cost $130, and the photo costs $10 or $20 more. The turnaround time can be sped up to two weeks or three weeks for an additional $60 — and for even faster processing, add $22 more. The fully expedited process for a new passport would cost at least $257.A birth certificate may be a quicker and cheaper choice for most people, but there are twists. The SAVE Act requires a certified birth certificate issued by a state, local government or tribal government. What does not appear to qualify is the certificate signed by the doctor that many new parents are given in the hospital when their child is born. It provides information similar to a certified birth certificate, but would not meet the letter of the federal legislation. Like passports, birth certificates can sometimes take weeks to obtain. Those who live near their birthplaces can visit the local vital statistics office, but staffing shortages and escalating demand for REAL IDs have caused significant backlogs in some states. In New York, the waiting period for certified copies is four months, the state said. Average processing times for online certificate requests vary widely by state, from as few as three days to 12 weeks or longer. People whose birth certificates don’t match their current IDs — mostly women who changed their names when they married — would likely need additional documentation to register to vote under the bill. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found about 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the U.S. take their husband’s last name.Notably, the SAVE Act does not provide any money to help states and local governments implement the changes or promote them to voters. For Bogdan, that was part of the problem when New Hampshire’s proof-of-citizenship law took effect. People who have voted elsewhere in the state are not required to show proof of citizenship in their new towns if poll workers confirm their registration history, but Bogdan said workers at his polling place did not seem to know that or try to look up the information. He eventually was able to cast his ballot because, by luck, he had recently retrieved his birth certificate from his parents’ house more than an hour away so he could apply for a REAL ID. But he said government notices to voters would help prevent possible disenfranchisement. “Young voters like myself don’t always carry around our birth certificate, Social Security card, all that important stuff, because it’s not used ever or very often,” he said. “And so all those young kids who are going to go out and try and vote will be held back from that.”Smyth covers government and politics from Columbus, Ohio, for The Associated Press. She was part of the AP team honored as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news.
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