Florida and Mississippi Enact New Voter Citizenship Verification Laws

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday signed separate election laws that tighten how voter citizenship is verified, aligning with but going beyond stalled Trump-backed federal proposals and immediately triggering at least two lawsuits in Florida. Both statutes require local officials to run voter registrations against databases and demand documentary proof of citizenship—such as birth certificates, passports, or naturalization papers—when applicants are flagged, with those who fail to provide documents removed from the rolls. Florida’s SAVE Act, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, also bars student IDs and retirement-community IDs as polling-place identification and will require new driver’s licenses issued after July 2027 to indicate citizenship status; Mississippi’s SHIELD Act, effective July 1, 2026, mandates extra checks when applicants lack a driver’s license number and requires a statewide database sweep before each federal election. DeSantis and Reeves frame the measures as critical to preventing noncitizen voting, while the League of Women Voters of Florida and the Southern Poverty Law Center argue they will disenfranchise eligible citizens who lack or cannot easily replace key documents—such as those born without birth certificates in the segregated South, people who lost records in hurricanes, or women whose names changed after marriage. The laws add Florida and Mississippi to a growing bloc of states adopting aggressive citizenship-verification regimes, a trend that’s drawing intense partisan reaction online as supporters highlight public distrust in elections and critics compare the documentation burdens to a modern poll tax likely to fall hardest on older, poorer and non-White voters.