By Anumita Kaur, Gaya Gupta · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Millions of Americans could be prevented from voting after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday requiring people to provide documents that prove they are citizens when they register to vote.
The order requires people to present a passport, a Real ID, a military identification card or another government-issued ID that indicates U.S. citizenship when registering to vote using federal forms. But a vast swath of Americans don’t have this kind of documentation, voting rights experts told The Washington Post. Election experts said legal challenges were a near-certainty.
High costs, bureaucratic delays and transportation issues are among myriad hurdles preventing many Americans from acquiring these forms of identification, which means Trump’s new mandate will make it harder for citizens to reach the ballot box, experts said.
“It would impact millions of people,” said Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. “It would radically upend voter registration.”
Many Real IDs do not indicate whether its holder is a U.S. citizen.Just five states offer “an enhanced driver’s license” that explicitly indicates citizenship status, and experts warned that the Real IDs being rolled out in each state might not qualify as a proof of citizenship on their own.
That means a passport would be the most realistic – if not the only – option for the vast majority of Americans to provide proof of citizenship, experts said. About 170 million Americans possess a valid passport, according to the State Department – which is roughly half the population.
“People just don’t have a passport because they’re not frequent international travelers,” Hayduk said. “For anyone that has ever tried to get a passport: It takes a long time, it’s a lot of documentation required.”
It’s also not cheap. Applying for a new passport costs $160, according to the State Department, which also charges $60 for expedited service.
“The primary reason anybody would get a passport is to do international travel, and that’s not something that a lot of Americans do because they can’t afford it, or perhaps they’re not interested in it,”said Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress. “The executive order is basically saying, like, if you are not a person who travels internationally or can afford travel internationally, now, you also might be blocked in the ballot box.”
Bedekovics said requiring passports could amount to a “poll tax,” which are outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Ceridwen Cherry, legal director of the advocacy group VoteRiders, added that securing a passport also involves traveling to relevant agencies to secure and submit documents – many of which are only open during most people’s working hours and may be miles away, posing another hurdle. “It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, and it can be weeks or months to get it,” she said, adding that many people may inadvertently miss voter registration cutoffs because of the lengthy process.
The issue of noncitizen voting is rare, according to academic and court reviews.
Republicans across the nation have sought for decades to mandate identification at the ballot box, and Trump’s order marks a new frontier in those efforts. It reflects his fixation on election administration, and his baseless claims that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were riddled with fraud, particularly illegal voting by noncitizens. There is no evidence that widespread corruption tainted either election.
Some election experts said Trump doesn’t have the power to issue this order. The U.S. Constitution gives states the ability to regulate the “time, place and manner” of elections but allows Congress to override those laws. It gives no power to the president to do so.
Meanwhile, the House is poised to pass legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It’s unclear whether that will pass the Senate. (That statute would allow voters to use birth certificates as proof of citizenship. The White House did not immediately say why it excluded birth certificates from its executive order, but Trump has sought to end birthright citizenship.)
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights program, is among several legal scholars to say that Trump does not have the power to impose such requirements. But assuming the executive order remains in effect, he said, “the consequences would be pretty disastrous.”
“States have multiple systems in place to ensure that only eligible citizens are allowed to vote,” Morales-Doyle said. “We don’t need a requirement that people show a passport in order to enforce those laws; those laws are already being enforced successfully.”
Morales-Doyle said he believes that, if enforced, the order would affect Republicans and Democrats across the electorate.
“It will impact people of every race and every ethnicity, every age group, no matter how you splice the demographics,” he said.
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Patrick Marley contributed to this report.