birth certificate

ORLANDO, Fla. — Governors in Florida and Mississippi signed into law measures that require officials to verify the citizenship of voters, just as similar legislation being pushed by President Trump has stalled in Congress.

The law signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was immediately challenged in court by civil rights organizations that said it will make it harder for Floridians to vote.

The citizenship provision of the law goes into effect Jan. 1. It requires voters to provide a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate as proof of citizenship if their eligibility to vote is challenged by government officials through cross-referencing voter registration applications with motor vehicle records.

“Many eligible voters do not have these documents and cannot obtain them for a variety of reasons — including because they were born without a birth certificate in the segregated South, because their documents were destroyed in a hurricane, or because they cannot afford the hundreds of dollars it costs to replace them,” the civil rights groups said in a lawsuit filed in federal court in South Florida.

The voting legislation being pushed aggressively by Trump in Congress would mandate that people provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, such as a U.S. passport, citizen naturalization certificate or a combination of a birth certificate and government-issued photo identification. It passed the House but was stalled in the Senate before lawmakers took a spring recess.

Under the Florida law, credit cards, student IDs and retirement community identifications can no longer be used as IDs when voting, and the citizenship status of a driver must be reflected on driver’s licenses starting in July 2027.

DeSantis said the law improves the security and transparency of Florida’s election system.

“In Florida, we will always stand up for election integrity,” the Republican governor said.

The new Mississippi law signed Wednesday requires local officials registering people to vote to run additional citizenship checks if applicants don’t have or can’t provide driver’s license numbers on their voter application. The law, which takes effect July 1, also requires the secretary of state to run annual checks of the voter rolls against an online database from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to flag any potential noncitizens who could be asked to provide proof of their eligibility.

“This is another win for election integrity in Mississippi [and America],” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said in a social media post. “We will continue to do everything in our power to make it infinitely harder — with a goal to make it impossible — to cheat in our elections!”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has said that the law could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Mississippians who don’t have a passport, lack a birth certificate or whose last names don’t match their birth certificates because of name changes due to marriage.

Four Republican-led states — Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota and Utah — have enacted laws this year to strengthen proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. In Michigan, supporters of voter citizenship documentation have submitted 750,000 petition signatures in a bid to get a constitutional amendment on the November ballot.

The Republican-led Kansas Legislature also has passed legislation, though it still must go before the Democratic governor. Gov. Laura Kelly has until next week to decide whether she’ll sign the bill and hasn’t said publicly what she will do, though she has regularly vetoed past GOP-election bills. Supporters would need a two-thirds majority to override a veto — and thanks to Republican dissenters, the bill appeared to be a few votes short of that in the House.

Any efforts in Kansas to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote are shadowed by one of the state’s biggest political fiascos in recent memory — a requirement imposed in 2013 that people registering to vote in the state for the first time provide documentation of their U.S. citizenship.

That law ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote, or 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press. AP writers David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Mo., and John Hanna in Topeka, Kan., contributed to this report.

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.

Even so, that did not mean proving his U.S. citizenship in last fall’s local elections was easy.

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.

The poll worker said that under the state’s new proof-of-citizenship law, 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 re-register at his new address. A scramble ensued, turning the voting process that he had always found fun and invigorating into a nerve-racking 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.”

Noncitizen voting is rare

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 being pushed aggressively by President Trump passes Congress and a “show your papers” law is put in place in time for the November midterm elections.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act, cleared the House last month on a mostly party-line basis. Republicans say it would improve election integrity. Trump has called its safeguards common sense. Democrats and voting rights advocates call it a clear act of voter suppression. The bill is scheduled to come up for debate and voting in the Senate next week.

Republican 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, and it is not allowed by any state. Cases where it occurs are rare and harshly punished.

Obtaining the necessary documents under the SAVE Act is not as easy as it might sound. A similar effort was tried in Kansas a 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.

Qualifying documents, with caveats

Rebekah Caruthers, president and chief executive 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.

Under the bill, a Real ID-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.

The stipulations continue, buried in the fine print.

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 fulfill that requirement. According to the Pentagon, that document lists only 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.

Passport requires time and money

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 that 21.3 million Americans who are eligible to vote do not possess 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. The SAVE Act requires the passport to be current; an expired one does not count.

Obtaining a passport in time for a looming voter registration deadline is another potential hurdle.

Workers who process passports had layoffs at the State Department reversed, but just last month the department forbid passport processing at certain public libraries 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 and renewals cost $130, while 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 significant burden for many voters.

Birth and marriage certificates

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 probably 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 writes for the Associated Press.