March 19, 2026, 4:03 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — If you want to understand what might happen nationwide if President Donald Trump‘s SAVE America Act goes into effect, ask lawyer Lauren Bonds, who fought — and defeated — a similar statewide law in Kansas nearly a decade ago.
Bonds was part of a legal team that sued Kansas and its secretary of state, Kris Kobach, after they implemented a voter registration law that required proof of citizenship to register to vote, as Trump’s proposal would.
A federal judge ruled that the state law was unconstitutional and violated federal election laws designed to protect people from being disenfranchised, or unfairly denied the ability to vote.
By then, though, the damage had been done. At least 31,000 people were barred from registering to vote, according to the judge’s findings, including in a key statewide election in 2014 in which incumbent Republican Gov. Sam Brownback narrowly defeated Democrat Paul Davis.
Trump said his bill — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — is so essential to election security that he will stop signing bills until the Senate follows the House’s lead and passes it.
The GOP’s push to do so this week has faced stiff opposition from Democrats. And while Republicans, who hold a majority in both houses of Congress, generally support the measure, many are unwilling to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster and its de facto supermajority requirement to pass it, as Trump demands.
Bonds and other voting rights advocates said that if Republicans manage to pass the SAVE America Act, or SAVE Act for short, it could disenfranchise vast numbers of eligible voters.
“It was tens of thousands of people in Kansas,” Bonds, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas at the time, told USA TODAY. “Obviously, if you multiply that nationally, it could really deprive a bunch of people who are undoubtedly lawfully authorized to vote from being able to cast their ballot.”
Max Flugrath, spokesman for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization, said that 12% of people who tried to register in Kansas were prevented from doing so before the law was struck down in 2018.
“Kansas already showed us what proof-of-citizenship laws do – block eligible voters, not noncitizens,” Flugrath told USA TODAY. “The SAVE Act could scale that nationally, meaning 21 million Americans without easy access to the newly required documents and 37 million who registered through systems it would dismantle could be blocked from voting.”
Here’s what happened in Kansas, and what it means for the current fight over the SAVE Act.
‘The roof is failing’
Kobach, a Republican, introduced the Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act at a January 2011 news conference, claiming it was needed to prevent fraud, especially to stop noncitizens from registering and voting.
When deliberating, Kansas lawmakers cited unfounded rumors of undocumented immigrants at meatpacking factories in the southwest part of the state trying to vote, Bonds said.
As presented, the law seemed fair and logical in focusing on preventing non-citizens from voting. As such, Bonds said, it enjoyed bipartisan support, including from some key Democrats.
The Kansas legislature passed the bill in March 2011, requiring photo ID requirements for in-person voting and new security measures for advance mail-in ballots. The next month, then-Gov. Sam Brownback signed it into law.
On Jan. 1, 2013, the law’s proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration went into effect, with voters needing to produce a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers. It made Kansas the only state in the nation, besides Arizona, with such a strict requirement, Bonds said.
Six months later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona could not require proof of citizenship for people who registered using the national mail voter registration form, created by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. That ruling, with national implications, conflicted with some aspects of the Kansas law.
In February 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Kobach and the state on behalf of plaintiffs and the Kansas League of Women Voters. In doing so, the state and national ACLU took pains not to make the issue political and decided not to focus on whether it intended to help Republicans gain an edge over Democrats.
Instead, Bonds said, they argued that “it was a bad law. And that it was a bad law that was implemented badly” by state officials who created chaos and confusion for people trying to register.
USA TODAY reached out to Kobach, now the state’s attorney general, and the Kansas Secretary of State’s office for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
In his opening statement at trial in March 2018, Kobach said that before the SAFE Act, the state had no way of knowing how many noncitizens were voting because the old method only required people to check boxes stating they were U.S. citizens and Kansas residents.
“Just having someone sign something is nothing,” Kobach said, according to a Courthouse News report from the trial. “It’s inadequate.”
Kobach used the metaphor of a leaky roof on a house to argue that the voter registration system was broken if even a relatively small number of noncitizens were able to register.
“If hundreds of drops are coming through,” Kobach said, “we would say the roof is failing.”
‘Weren’t able to get the documents they needed’
Two sets of plaintiffs ultimately sued, including Steven Wayne Fish and others who said they attempted to register to vote when applying for a driver’s license but were denied for failing to submit proof of citizenship by state officials who said the new state law required it.
Another case, led by plaintiff Parker Bednasek, challenged the Kansas law on broader constitutional grounds.
As a lead lawyer from the state ACLU, Bonds helped coordinate the legal battle in tandem with attorneys from the national and state ACLU and other voting rights groups. The two lawsuits were consolidated and ultimately claimed that more than 31,000 voter registrations were blocked or suspended for failure to provide proof of citizenship.
Many of those would-be voters tried to register through routine channels, like when getting their driver’s licenses. They were placed into a suspended status when they didn’t submit additional documents.
An unknown number of people were given bad information by state employees, especially at Division of Motor Vehicles offices. Others simply gave up on the process, the lawsuit alleged, because they couldn’t get the required documents in time.
“One of the problems of this case was that the law was implemented shortly before an election,” Bonds said. “So a lot of people, even if they were on top of things, were in a position where they weren’t able to get the documents they needed to fix their ballots,” once they discovered they had not met the new registration requirements.
A lost birth certificate, a policy disagreement
Fish, who worked the overnight shift at an American Eagle distributor, applied to register to vote in August 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver’s license.
According to his lawsuit, the driver’s license examiner didn’t inform Fish that he needed a citizenship document to register to vote. Fish left the office believing he had registered to vote.
When he later discovered he wasn’t eligible, Fish tried to obtain a replacement birth certificate, “but could not determine how to do so — he was born on a decommissioned Air Force base in Illinois,” the suit said.
So Fish scrambled to find his original birth certificate. The process took two years and deprived him of the chance to vote in the 2014 general election, he alleged.
In May 2016, Fish’s sister located a copy of his birth certificate that his mother had placed in a family safe before she died in 2013, the suit said. He registered and voted in the 2016 election.
Others included in Fish’s lawsuit cited similar experiences, including Kansas Department of Corrections employee Donna Bucci and English professor Thomas Boynton.
Bednasek, the lead plaintiff in the other lawsuit, moved from Texas to Kansas in August 2014 to attend the University of Kansas and became a volunteer with the Kansas Democratic Party.
After discussing the new law with Party colleagues, Bednasek canceled his Texas voter registration and tried to register in Douglas County, his suit said. When told he needed proof of citizenship, he said he didn’t have it – and that he did “not agree with the law requiring” it.
His voter registration application was canceled on March 4, 2016, and Bednasek filed suit in response.
More disenfranchisement caused than fraud prevented
During the legal battle, the plaintiffs presented evidence of disenfranchisement.
Kobach personally defended the case at trial, arguing that the SAFE law did not have a material impact on voter registration.
One witness called by the state was Steven Camarota, who was at the time the director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Camarota, described as an expert “in the fields of demography, census data, voter registration statistics, and voter participation statistics,” testified that there was actually an increase in registration and turnout from October 2010 to October 2014 and that therefore, the law “did not unduly burden Kansans’ ability to register and vote,” according to court documents from the case.
The plaintiffs responded that his testimony had no bearing on the fact that tens of thousands of Kansans were unfairly disenfranchised.
Despite Kobach’s claims of widespread fraud, Kansas presented evidence of only 39 noncitizens who had registered to vote over two decades. In 2016, federal courts blocked the state from enforcing the proof-of-citizenship requirement for voters registering at motor vehicle offices.
On June 18, 2018, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson issued a 118-page ruling, holding that the Kansas law imposed an undue burden on eligible voters and violated the National Voter Registration Act. It also violated the Constitution, Robinson ruled, by infringing on the right to vote under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
In her ruling, Robinson said the law championed by Kobach disenfranchised “tens of thousands of eligible citizens” by preventing them from registering to vote before she issued a preliminary injunction.
And she held that the registration process was especially “burdensome” for “first-time voters, the elderly, and individuals with limited resources and time.”
Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, called it a “stinging rebuke” of Kobach and his “show-me-your-papers law.”
“That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant election fraud,” Ho, who is now a federal judge, said in a statement. “The court found that there is ‘no credible evidence’ for that falsehood, and correctly ruled that Kobach’s documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution.”
Kansas fought the ruling, but a federal appeals court upheld it. In 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal.
Robinson had previously held Kobach in contempt of court for skirting court orders related to the law and failing to send postcards confirming registration for thousands of voters. In striking down the law, she ordered him to take six additional hours of continuing legal education.
Finally, on Sept. 10, 2021, the state agreed to pay $1.9 million in plaintiff legal fees.
Kobach still alleged voter fraud through non-citizen voting
Since the legal battle began, Kobach unsuccessfully ran for Kansas governor and U.S. senator. He has become one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in fighting for voting laws aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting.
In November 2016, Kobach met with Trump soon after his victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, and backed up Trump’s baseless claims that he would have won the popular vote − instead of losing by nearly 3 million votes − if illegal votes were discounted.
“I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point,” Kobach claimed, citing the same widely disputed study he used to defend the Kansas SAFE Act in court.
In May 2017, Trump — via a presidential Executive Order — appointed Kobach as vice chair of a controversial “Voter Fraud” commission charged with studying “the registration and voting processes used in federal elections” and identifying “vulnerabilities in voting systems” that could lead to voter fraud.
“We’ve had substantial numbers of noncitizens getting on our voter rolls,” Kobach told The New York Times in that month. “If other states are experiencing the same problem, then I think it would be appropriate for them to consider what Kansas has done.”
Trump established the commission, formally known as the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” amid his repeated assertions that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election and deprived him of beating Clinton.
On January 3, 2018, Trump issued another executive order dissolving the commission before it could issue a final report, reportedly because it found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
