With Americans set to vote on November 3 in midterm elections that could see Republicans lose control of Congress, President Donald Trump has pressed a series of measures that would restrict access to the ballot. Under the US Constitution, elections are organized by the states. Jonathan Diaz, director for voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, said the administration has tried to insert the federal government into almost every aspect of the election process.

Proof of citizenship: the SAVE Act

At the center of the push is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require people to present documentary proof of United States citizenship in order to vote. The bar is high because the US has no national identity card: a driver's license or other official form of identification would not be sufficient if it does not indicate a place of birth.

Under the bill, the papers that would qualify include:

• •a valid US passport
• •military ID
• •a government photo ID showing US birth
• •a birth certificate - but only if it matches the person's current name exactly

That name-match rule could pose a problem for the 69 million women who changed their names after getting married, as well as for the trans community. According to the Campaign Legal Center, more than 21 million Americans - nearly 10 percent of voting-age Americans - lack access to documentary proof of citizenship. A 2024 Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement report found that 3 percent of people of color lack proof of US citizenship, against 1 percent of white Americans.

The bill responds to Trump's repeated claims that large numbers of noncitizens vote in US elections. Such voting is exceedingly rare: voting already requires an ID, and non-citizens who vote face fines, prison or deportation. The Heritage Foundation's database includes 100 cases of noncitizen voting from 1982 to 2025 - about 0.000008 percent of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections in that period, as the New York Times reported in April.

Where the SAVE Act stands

The SAVE Act passed the US House of Representatives in February before languishing in the Senate due to a lack of support. Trump allies are now pursuing it via budget reconciliation. A GOP amendment sought to curtail the ability to vote by mail or online by overhauling those systems to comply with the stricter ID measures.

Screening voters: the SAVE database and prosecutions

Separately from the bill, the Trump administration last year expanded the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, allowing states to use it to verify whether someone is eligible to vote. At least 25 states opted into the voluntary system, which scanned 67 million registrations before a US district judge blocked it in June over privacy concerns.

The US Supreme Court lifted that block in a September ruling, allowing use of the database to continue - though its effect on the midterms may be limited, since states cannot purge people from electoral rolls less than 90 days before an election. In Travis County, Texas, 97 people flagged as noncitizens - 10 percent of them, and possibly up to 21 percent - were actually US nationals, per the AP.

Diaz said the database is especially unreliable for naturalized citizens. The enforcement arm has been busy as well: the Justice Department said in mid-October that it had charged 113 people across 20 states with either voting or registration offenses in the past seven weeks. Earlier, the department said it had charged some 90 people for election misconduct in 2026, including 50 who are suspected of having voted as noncitizens.

One of those caught up in the sweeps is Jose Antonio Banuelos-Diaz, 42, who has lived in the US for 40 years. He was accused of trying to register to vote in 2007 when he applied for a driver's license. He denies it - "I have never voted because I know I can't vote," he told AP after his arrest - and faces five years in prison if convicted, but has been released.

The department has also sent letters to nearly all 50 states demanding unredacted copies of their voter registration rolls. At least 30 states and the District of Columbia were later sued over their voter registration lists; 26 of those lawsuits were subsequently dismissed, and at least 16 states handed over or promised their lists.

Mail-in voting and the map

Trump has been, in Diaz's words, "irrationally" suspicious of mail-in voting, partly because many voters relied on it in 2020 due to Covid-19. In March, he signed an executive order that created new regulations for the US postal system, imposing new USPS standards on voter-specific data and ballot envelopes; the Supreme Court blocked it in September.

The party split on postal voting is marked: per the MIT Election Data & Science Lab, 37 percent of Democrats reported voting by mail in 2024, compared with 24 percent of Republicans. US elections are held on Tuesdays, and many people choose to use mail-in voting instead of going to the polls in person to avoid missing a day of work.

In California, the administration sued to stop the state counting some 20,000 mail-in ballots it says were sent by noncitizens. A federal judge ruled the count should go ahead, saying the administration's request "violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections." Diaz noted that California looked at the list and found that half of the people on it were born in the United States, so they are citizens.

The map itself has been another front. Trump urged Republicans to redraw dozens of US House of Representatives districts to favor the party, notably in Texas. Gerrymandering has been used to disadvantage voters along class or race lines - Republicans have sometimes split up areas with a large Black population to lower their collective voting power, since those areas tend to vote Democrat.

After Texas adopted a map giving Republicans five more House seats, California voters overwhelmingly approved a new congressional map that would give Democrats five more seats.

'An atmosphere of fear and uncertainty'

Diaz said that even without changing any rules, the accumulation of efforts has created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty ahead of the midterms. Voters' own confidence splits by party: an Associated Press-NORC poll found only 55 percent of Democrats said they are confident the final count after the midterm will be accurate, compared with 38 percent of Republicans.

Diaz said he expects Trump to certainly continue to try to make mail-in voting more difficult and to add new restrictions to it, though he does not think Trump has much chance of success. The administration has appealed the Supreme Court's decision on the postal executive order, but the court is unlikely to reinstate it ahead of the midterms - leaving the SAVE Act stalled in the Senate as November 3 approaches.