On the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over birthright citizenship, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed one of the most far-reaching state voting restrictions in the country — and two federal lawsuits arrived before the ink was dry.
House Bill 991, which DeSantis signed April 1 at a ceremony in The Villages, requires Florida residents to prove their U.S. citizenship using a passport, birth certificate, or similar document in order to register to vote. It eliminates student IDs and retirement community cards as acceptable voter identification. And unlike most comparable laws passed in other states, it applies retroactively — meaning Floridians who have been registered voters for years must now also verify their citizenship through government databases.
The law is Florida's version of the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which has been stalled in the U.S. Senate since February after passing the House. Unable to wait for Congress, Florida Republicans passed their own version in a party-line vote of 88-31 in the state House.
What the Law Does
HB 991 makes several significant changes to Florida's voting and election system:
- Proof of citizenship required to register: Prospective voters must submit a U.S. passport, birth certificate, naturalization certificate, or other approved document to register. Florida REAL ID–compliant driver's licenses that verify citizenship will also qualify.
- Existing voters must be reverified: The law applies retroactively. Florida's online voter registration system must now cross-check all registered voters' legal status against Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles records. Long-registered voters could be flagged for removal if they don't match.
- Student IDs and retirement home IDs eliminated: Both are removed from the list of acceptable voter identification documents.
- Paper ballots required for all voting: The law mandates paper ballots statewide to allow verifiable recounts.
- Dual citizenship disclosure: Candidates must disclose whether they hold dual citizenship. Those seeking federal offices must also disclose whether they plan to trade stocks while in office.
Most provisions take effect in January 2027 — after the 2026 midterm elections — meaning they will first apply in the 2028 presidential cycle.
What DeSantis Said
"Our constitution says only American citizens are allowed to vote in our elections, and so, we need to make sure that is the law," DeSantis said at the signing ceremony in The Villages. His office framed the legislation as part of a broader effort to "protect and expand integrity" in Florida's voter registration process.
State Senator Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, one of the bill's sponsors, called the changes "common sense" and said government-issued IDs with credible verification systems should be the baseline for election participation.
DeSantis predicted the lawsuits but expressed confidence they would fail. "They go to a liberal judge. The liberal judge sides with them. Then we appeal and we win," he said.
The Lawsuits
Two federal lawsuits were filed within hours of the signing.
The first was brought by the Elias Law Group on behalf of the Florida NAACP and the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. "HB 991 imposes sweeping new documentary proof of citizenship requirements that will prevent eligible Floridians from registering and voting," the complaint states. "It requires voters to produce specific documents to prove their citizenship and subjects even long-registered voters to burdensome verification processes, all without evidence of a problem the law purports to solve."
The second was filed by a broader coalition — the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Immigration Coalition, Florida Rising, Common Cause, Hispanic Federation, and UnidosUS — in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Legal counsel was provided by the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and the Advancement Project.
Both lawsuits allege violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, arguing the law places an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. Both seek injunctive relief to block the law's enforcement.
The second lawsuit raises a specific technical concern: the government databases Florida plans to use to verify citizenship were "never designed for that purpose" and "routinely misidentify citizens as noncitizens" — particularly for naturalized citizens, whose naturalization records are often not captured in Department of Homeland Security files.
"Unlike some other documentary proof-of-citizenship laws, this one applies retroactively to currently registered voters, making it even likelier that eligible voters will be both wrongly prevented from registering and/or erroneously removed from the rolls," the League of Women Voters wrote in a press statement.
Who's Most at Risk
Both lawsuits and civil rights groups have identified specific populations they say face the greatest disenfranchisement risk:
- Naturalized citizens, whose citizenship documents may not appear in DHS state databases
- Black voters who grew up in the segregated South, where many births were never officially registered
- Floridians whose documents were destroyed by hurricanes — a far from theoretical risk in a state that averages multiple major storms per decade
- Women who have changed their names after marriage or divorce, whose current legal name may not match their birth certificate
- Low-income voters who cannot afford the cost of replacing documents — a U.S. passport costs $165; some birth certificate replacements require travel, fees, and time
- Students, whose IDs are no longer valid for voter identification
- Transgender voters, whose legal names or documents may have been updated
- Seniors in retirement facilities, whose retirement home IDs are no longer accepted
Jonathan Topaz of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project put it plainly: "This law targets Florida's most vulnerable voters — older Black voters who grew up in the Jim Crow South, naturalized citizens, transgender people, low-income voters, voters with disabilities — all in service of perpetuating the fact-free myth of widespread non-citizen registration and voting."
The Data on Noncitizen Voting
Supporters of the law cite election integrity. But the data on the scale of the problem being addressed is thin.
DeSantis's own Office of Election Crimes and Security — created specifically to investigate voter fraud — found 198 noncitizens registered to vote out of approximately 13.3 million registered Florida voters. That is 0.00001 percent of the registered voter pool, or fewer than 1 potential noncitizen for every 70,000 registered voters. There is no public evidence that any of those 198 actually cast a ballot.
An Economist/YouGov poll from March 2026 found 59 percent of American adults support requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, while 29 percent oppose it — suggesting the policy has broad popular backing even when the documented problem is small.
The Kansas Precedent
Florida is not the first state to try this. Kansas enacted a proof-of-citizenship voting law in 2013 under then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The results were decisive — and not in the way Kobach intended.
Before courts blocked full enforcement, the Kansas law prevented approximately 31,000 eligible citizens from registering to vote. In 2016, a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked Kobach from enforcing the law, calling it "a mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right." In 2018, a federal judge struck it down entirely, finding it violated the National Voter Registration Act and the Constitution. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2020, leaving the lower court ruling intact.
The Florida lawsuits cited Kansas directly as a controlling precedent.
The Federal SAVE Act Connection
Florida's law is explicitly modeled on the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which passed the U.S. House but stalled in the Senate. President Trump called the federal version "one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in February: "Not a single Democrat will support the SAVE Act. It is a radical bill." Democrats have signaled they would filibuster any floor vote.
Florida moved unilaterally after the federal bill stalled. Mississippi is also advancing a similar measure, the SHIELD Act, which would use state and federal databases to flag and remove noncitizens from voter rolls.
The legal battles over Florida's HB 991 will likely serve as a preview of the constitutional arguments that would surround a federal version — particularly whether database-based citizenship verification is sufficiently reliable to justify removing eligible voters from the rolls.
What Happens Next
The two lawsuits will proceed in separate federal district courts. Plaintiffs are expected to seek preliminary injunctions to block enforcement while litigation continues. A judge could grant a temporary restraining order relatively quickly; a full ruling could take months or years.
DeSantis's projection that the law will ultimately survive is not without basis — the current Supreme Court has shown greater deference to state election law restrictions than prior courts. But the Kansas precedent, the retroactive application to existing voters, and the specific concern about database accuracy all give plaintiffs substantial legal arguments.
Florida's existing voter rolls contain 13.3 million registered voters. Under the new law, all of them are subject to citizenship reverification through systems that civil rights groups say were never designed for that purpose. The question courts will ultimately answer: whether protecting against 198 documented registrations — none confirmed as votes — justifies a system that could remove tens of thousands of eligible citizens from the rolls.