Bill requiring citizenship database checks for voter registration heads to governor’s desk 

A bill authorizing county election administrators to verify Tennessee voters’ immigration status through a federal database is on its way to the governor’s desk after Senate Republicans on Monday voted to approve the measure. 

The bill (SB2204/HB2185) by Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin and House Leader William Lamberth of Sumner County, both Republicans, is dependent on whether the United States Department of Homeland Security makes the data available to state election officials via a secure web service known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).

Current law already requires voters to attest to their citizenship status when registering to vote: the state then verifies citizenship using state and federal data sources.

Johnson said the bill was intended to intercept potentially fraudulent registration at the point of voter registration.

“This bill would allow election officials to use SAVE data during the initial application review,” Johnson said. 

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat, cited high error rates that have occurred in verifying citizenship status through the SAVE system in the past.

The system is routinely used to verify citizenship eligibility for a variety of public services with a low error rate. But in states such as Texas, which has deployed the SAVE checks for voter registration, some county election officials mistakenly flagged voters as noncitizens upwards at high rates, up to 14% of the time, according to reporting by Pro Publica and the Texas Tribune.

 Johnson said existing election law already provides potential voters denied registration with an appeals process.

“You can bring appropriate documentation for consideration by the election administrator, election coordinator, so all of those provisions will remain in place,” Johnson said. “So someone is falsely deemed to be ineligible to vote under this system, they would have a mechanism to appeal and provide the necessary documentation,” he said. 

The bill, already in the House, was passed on a party-line 27-6 vote Monday in the Senate. 

If signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee, the bill’s implementation would remain contingent on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security working with Tennessee’s election officials to “create a secure, electronic portal through which each county administrator of elections may access information” by 2028 to verify citizenship status.

Separately the similarly-named federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act would require states such as Tennessee to create mechanisms to verify immigration status upon voter registration. The measure, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year, requires voters to provide proof of citizenship at the point of voter registration. The U.S. Senate has yet to take up a vote on the measure.