JACKSON, Miss.—Mississippi Republicans are celebrating Gov. Tate Reeves signing the SHIELD Act into law on April 1, which mandates the Mississippi secretary of state to verify citizenship for the entire rollbook of registered voters annually.
Mississippi’s new law comes just as similar legislation being pushed by President Donald Trump has stalled in Congress.
“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!”
Senate Bill 2588 will allow the Mississippi secretary of state to enter the entire voter rollbook, also known as the Statewide Elections Management System, into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements every year. The system is an online service for government agencies used to verify immigration and citizenship status.
The SHIELD Act requires local officials who register 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 Southern Poverty Law Center has criticized the law, arguing its provisions 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.
“Asking voters to take additional and unnecessary steps to vote will place undue burdens on voters, who already have the legal right to vote. In Mississippi, rural voters may have to drive hours round trip to reach the office where they can obtain official records. For people living on fixed incomes, cost matters,” Sonya Williams Barnes, Mississippi policy director for the law center said in a March 23 press release. “We need state legislators to serve the public good, rather than their own self-interest. Protecting election integrity shouldn’t come at the expense of limiting access for eligible voters.”
Mississippi Senate Elections Committee Chairman Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, said about 15 noncitizens had attempted the register to vote out of the 1.7 million Mississippians who are registered to vote when Sen. Johnny DuPree, D-Hattiesburg, asked on the Senate floor on Feb. 5.
“Why are we putting so much attention to 15 individuals? And you said yourself that some of those were just checking a box that they should not have checked so it could be less than 15,” DuPree asked England.
“Yes, and Sen. DuPree, I thank you for that question because election integrity a lot of times depends on perception of the election, it depends on voter confidence, but we want voters confident in our elections,” England replied. “And even if we have one instance of a voter who’s not supposed to be voting in our elections and once that’s reported, the integrity of our system and the confidence that voters have goes way down and we don’t want that. We want more people voting; we want to get rid of voter apathy.”
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office to verify the number of noncitizens attempting to register to vote.
“We found a range of persons who were sent over as a person who registered with DPS but who did in fact not register (and were non-citizens) to actual non-citizens who registered to vote,” Communications Director Elizabeth Johnson said in a March 13 statement to the Mississippi Free Press. “Those cases in which non-citizens registered were transferred to law enforcement.”
She did not respond to a question about what year the SOS office found noncitizens attempting to register to vote.
Within 30 days of receiving notice from the State, the SHIELD Act says applicants who are registering to vote would have to prove U.S. citizenship via passport, birth certificate, U.S. naturalization documentation or any other proof of citizenship that the Federal Immigration Reform and Control Act established in 1986.
The Mississippi secretary of state would also have the responsibility to compare the state’s rollbook records with the SAVE database “no later than one hundred eighty (180) days before a regularly scheduled federal general election.” The secretary would share any potential ineligible matches with local election officials, who would send the notices to voters.
S.B. 2588 does not include criminal penalties for non-citizens who attempt to vote or register to vote in Mississippi.
The State “may not” remove a voter from the rollbook “based on a SAVE match” and would not cancel the voter’s registration unless the voter failed to respond to the verification request or presented information that confirmed they are ineligible to vote at least 90 days before a federal election, the SHIELD Act says.
The Senate passed the SHIELD Act by a 33-17 vote on Feb. 5 and the House passed an amended version by a 80-41 vote on March 4.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed into law a measure that requires officials to verify the citizenship of voters. The law 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.
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.
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Mississippi Free Press Reporter Heather Harrison reported from Jackson.
Associated Press writers David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.
