Noncitizen voting is rare. Why is Washington so focused on it?

A flood of Republican-backed efforts to tighten voter ID laws is serving as a distraction from more serious threats to the American voting system, according to top election security experts.

“[Washington] is chasing false narratives and leaving open all the vulnerabilities that are only worse now,” said Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, a bipartisan organization that tracks election issues.

Experts like McNulty point to recent rollbacks to frontline programs that protect state and local elections, as well as cuts to the top federal agency that guards electoral systems, as key threats ahead of the midterms. But lawmakers are focused elsewhere: They're currently debating policy measures to crack down on noncitizen voting and move election certification authorities to the federal government.

The batch of bills brought forward by Republicans includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act and the Make Elections Great Again Act.

The SAVE America Act, an updated version of a bill to tighten voter registration standards that narrowly passed the House last year, was approved by the House last week following pressure from President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and far-right influencers. The bill includes robust changes to how Americans vote, including requiring voters to present proof of citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — to register to vote, as well as requiring photo ID to cast a ballot in every state.

The bill would also require states to send their voter rolls to DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a program run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that has faced scrutiny for reportedly purging eligible voters from state voter rolls.

During a press conference last Friday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that current guidelines fail to “effectively stop states from going forward and checking citizenship during [voter] registration.” “The SAVE America Act would fix this. It would make sure that we close those loopholes and ensure in American elections, only Americans vote,” she said.

The MEGA Act includes similar voter ID provisions, but also includes requirements for the attorney general to certify election funding for states and authorizes the attorney general to sue states that don’t comply with federal election requirements.

House Administration Committee panel Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who introduced the bill last month, called it a “common sense” measure that would crack down on noncitizen voting during a hearing assessing the MEGA Act last week. Other supporters, including Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray (R), said the bill would establish “baseline standards” for elections nationwide.

Trump has vowed to force through stricter voter ID laws before the midterms “whether approved by Congress or not,” and pledged to fight the issue in the courts, should these bills face a likely Democratic filibuster.

While Hill Republicans and members of the Trump administration have framed these bills as much-needed reform for pressing election security issues, data collected by state election offices suggests that the threat being targeted is largely overblown.

Noncitizen voting in the U.S. is extremely rare, and state election offices conduct regular assessments of their voter rolls to curb risks of voter fraud. A recent report from the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research found that many claims of noncitizen voting stem from “misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”

The report highlighted a 2025 voter roll audit by Michigan’s Department of State, which found that of the 7.2 million active registered voters on the state’s rolls, there were only 16 instances of suspected noncitizens who cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election. Other states, including Louisiana and Utah, recently conducted audits of their voter rolls and found few incidents of noncitizen voting or voter registration.

“When you actually look at the data, there is not a problem that needs to be solved here,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director of the voting rights and election team at the Brennan Center for Justice.

At the same time, there are heightened concerns that Washington’s fixation on voter ID laws is glossing over more important issues, such as gaps in federal election security support slashed under Trump.

The Trump administration rolled back CISA’s election security work last year, which previously included hundreds of cybersecurity assessments for local election officials. The agency also previously provided security assessments that evaluated the physical security of voting locations, election offices and tabulation centers.

The funding cuts to election security work also forced the Election Infrastructure-Information Sharing and Analysis Center to close its doors last year. The EI-ISAC, which was previously housed at CISA, provided technical assistance and guidance to election offices across the country at no cost. State officials can now get an EI-ISAC membership if they pay to join the Center for Internet Security’s Multi-State ISAC.

In previous years, the EI-ISAC would provide an Election Day situation room, where federal agencies would coordinate to provide state and local election officials with real-time updates on physical and cybersecurity threats nationwide. After the federal cuts early last year, election officials relied on local news coverage to stay informed of the threat landscape during the state and local elections across the country.

“Why are we cutting election cybersecurity support if election security is so important?” McNulty said. “We have outdated voting equipment, we have outdated election infrastructure. We have massive cuts to CISA and DHS’s cybersecurity support for elections. We have dismantled funding for the coordinating bodies.”

State election officials say they are already experiencing the fallout from the loss of federal support.

“If the president and his administration were actually serious about protecting the security of our elections, they would not be cutting the federal government’s existing, well-established web of leaders who were in place to protect our elections from any type of foreign interference,” said Jocelyn Benson (D), Michigan’s secretary of state, during the National Association of Secretaries of State Winter Summit last month.

A spokesperson for CISA told POLITICO in a statement that claims that the agency "is not communicating with our state and local partners is false."

"Every day, DHS and CISA are providing the most capable and timely threat intelligence, expertise, no-cost tools and resources these partners need to defend against risks," the CISA spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Trump has resurfaced baseless claims that the 2020 elections were “rigged” and urged Republicans to “nationalize” voting in more than a dozen places. In recent weeks, the Trump administration also began investigating alleged issues with U.S. voting machines and past election fraud.

Trump directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election with Kurt Olsen, the president’s former campaign lawyer known for peddling debunked claims of election fraud. And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently appeared at an FBI raid on an Atlanta-area elections office at the center of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, and led a team that seized several voting machines in Puerto Rico last year.

Gabbard has claimed the investigation found cybersecurity vulnerabilities that could put U.S. elections at risk — sparking pushback from election officials and congressional Democrats that the administration is planting seeds of doubt in the country’s election integrity ahead of the midterms.

Andrew Howard and Erin Doherty contributed to this report.