WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed one of Republicans' signature issues for the year on Thursday, approving legislation to require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote for federal elections, one of President Donald Trump's top election-related priorities.
Nearly all Democrats lined up against the bill and warned that it risks disenfranchising millions of Americans who do not have ready access to the proper documents.
Trump has long signaled a desire to change how elections are run in the U.S. and last month issued a sweeping executive order that included a citizenship requirement among other election-related changes.
Republicans argued the legislation, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, is necessary to ensure only citizens vote in U.S. elections and would cement Trump’s order into law.
U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House committee that handles election legislation, said during Thursday's debate that the bill is meant to “restore Americans’ confidence in our elections” and prevent noncitizens from voting.
This marks Republicans’ second attempt at passing the SAVE Act. It passed the House last year but failed in the Senate amid Democratic opposition.
It’s unlikely to fare any better this year. While Republicans won control of the Senate last fall, they have a narrow majority that falls short of the 60 votes they would need to overcome a filibuster.
Republicans hammered on the issue during last year’s presidential election, even though voting by noncitizens is rare, already is illegal and can lead to felony charges and deportation.
The SAVE Act would require all applicants using the federal voter registration form to provide documentary proof of citizenship in person at their local election office. Among the acceptable documents are a valid U.S. passport and a government-issued photo ID card presented alongside a certified birth certificate.
Democrats and voting rights groups warn the legislation could lead to widespread voter disenfranchisement if it were to become law. The Brennan Center for Justice and other groups estimated in a 2023 report that 9% of U.S. citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, do not have proof of their citizenship readily available. Almost half of Americans don’t have a U.S. passport.
In Kansas, a proof-of-citizenship requirement that passed in 2011 ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens in the state who were otherwise eligible to vote. The law was later declared unconstitutional by a federal court and hasn’t been enforced since 2018.
“Just to exercise their inalienable right as citizens of this country, Republicans would force Americans into a paperwork nightmare,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York. “This bill is really about disenfranchising Americans — not noncitizens, Americans.”
A further concern came up several times Thursday: Married women would need multiple documents to prove their citizenship if they have changed their name.
It was a complication that arose in town hall elections held last month in New Hampshire, which was enforcing a new state law requiring proof of citizenship to register. One woman, since divorced, told a local elections clerk that her first marriage was decades ago in Florida and that she no longer had the marriage certificate showing her name change. She was unable to register and vote for her town election.
“This legislation would immediately disenfranchise the 69 million women who have changed their names after marriage or divorce,” said Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat from North Carolina.
Rep. Laurel Lee, a Republican from Florida, said the bill “contemplates this exact situation” of married women whose names have changed, saying it “explicitly directs states to establish a process for them to register to vote.”
Morelle countered by saying, “Why not write it in the bill? Why are we making the potential for 50 different standards to be set? ... How much paperwork do Republicans expect Americans to drown in?”
On a call with reporters Thursday, Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, said she started trying to gather her own personal documents that would be required under the bill about 10 days ago. She doesn't yet have them together despite having more time and know-how than many other people.
“It pushes women out of the democratic process,” she said of the documentation requirement. “And it’s not a coincidence. It’s part of a strategy to make voting harder, to sow distrust in our elections."
Democrats also said the bill would disproportionately affect older people in assisted care facilities, military service members who wouldn’t be able to solely use their military IDs, people of color and working-class Americans who may not have the time or money to jump through bureaucratic hoops.
“The SAVE Act is everything our civil rights leaders fought against,” said Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat from Georgia.
Republicans have defended the legislation as necessary to restore public confidence in elections and say it allows states to adopt procedures to help voters comply. They have disputed Democratic characterizations of the bill.
Four Democrats voted in favor of the legislation: Reps. Ed Case of Hawaii, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Perez of Washington.
“The truth is, those who were registered to vote would still be able to vote under their current registration,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who sponsored the bill. “We have mechanisms giving the state fairly significant deference to make determinations as to how to structure the situation where an individual does have a name change, which of course is often women.”
On Thursday, Roy said Cleta Mitchell, a key figure in Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election results, “had a significant hand in what we’re doing here.” Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer, has played a central role in coordinating the movement to tighten voting laws across the country.
Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden but has repeatedly made the bogus claim that it was stolen from him. There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim: Elections officials and his own attorney general rejected the notion, and his arguments have been roundly dismissed by the courts, including judges he appointed.
Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who serves as Arizona’s top state election official, described the voting proposal as a solution in search of a problem, given how rare noncitizen voting is.
“What it is doing is capitalizing on fear -- fear built on a lie,” Fontes said. “And the lie is that a whole bunch of people who aren’t eligible are voting. That’s just not true.”
Cassidy reported from Atlanta, Fernando from Chicago. Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
FILE - Santa Fe County, N.M., residents fill out general election ballots during the first day of general election voting, Oct. 11, 2022, in a hallway outside the Santa Fe County Clerk's Office in Santa Fe, N.M. (AP Photo/Morgan Lee, File)
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions from reporters at a news conference, at the Capitol, in Washington, Tuesday, April 1, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Voters mark their ballots while voting at Centennial Hall at the Milwaukee Central Library on Election Day Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
