The same Heritage Foundation that gave Donald Trump his Project 2025 playbook has plans for who will get to vote in the upcoming midterms and beyond.
And in Tallahassee and Washington, Republicans are happy to oblige.
Two Florida bills, SB 1334 and HB 991, are state versions of the notorious federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Similar efforts failed in 2025 but both are back, getting warm receptions from Florida’s legislative GOP supermajority and on Capitol Hill, where the House is expected to pass the voter suppression bill this week.
The legislation is all about the myth of noncitizen voters. To stop them, the argument goes, voters need to prove U.S. citizenship when registering or voting.
It might seem fair or simple. It is neither.
The bills vary, but all require citizenship papers that certain groups are less likely to have. For instance, the vast majority of married and divorced women could not prove citizenship by their birth certificate, because it has their maiden name.
In fact, roughly nine percent of Americans — a figure that translates to 1.6 million Floridians — may not have ready access to proof of citizenship, according to a 2024 Brennan Center survey.
Seniors may not have birth certificates. People living far from their birthplaces face long-distance bureaucratic hurdles to get them. Not everyone has a passport because not all people, especially working families and younger voters, travel internationally. A Florida-issued REAL ID driver’s license or state ID might prove citizenship, but not all eligible voters drive.
“SB 1334 relies on error-prone databases and then forces voters to provide documents to prove their citizenship if the databases get it wrong,” says Common Cause Florida’s Amy Keith. “If voters can’t produce specific documents, they will be kicked off the rolls, even if they’ve been voting for years.”
And while it may seem inconceivable to Florida lawmakers focused more on suppressing voter turnout than the high cost of living, some of their constituents cannot afford to take time off from work to track down and pay for copies of the right documents, arrange transportation to a government office and shell out $25 for a Florida ID.
The Heritage Foundation, though, is all in.
Karen Jaroch of Heritage Action was on hand at a Florida Senate hearing armed with Heritage’s usual distortions. Naivete is too kind a word for bill sponsor Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, and others nodding along to Heritage’s insistence that noncitizens are filling Florida polling stations.
Give it a Google search
Law enforcement, government officials, think tanks and academics have spent two decades searching for evidence of noncitizens voting.
Had Florida lawmakers bothered with a Google search before filing their bills, they would have found what Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson did in 2025. Her office unearthed just one confirmed noncitizen among two million registered voters. One. It’s a pattern: Noncitizen voter registration is rare, and noncitizen voting rarer still.
Even the conservative libertarian Cato Institute has weighed in against proof of citizenship laws. But Heritage is not conservative. It is radical, and so are the anti-voting measures it is peddling in Florida and elsewhere: “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich famously declared.
Kansas paid the real-world price for what Florida is considering. Backers of that state’s proof-of-citizenship law cited 39 instances of noncitizen registration over a period of 13 years. But that state’s law blocked more than 31,000 otherwise eligible U.S. citizens from registering to vote, or 12% of Kansas residents who tried to register.
No amount of political posturing about election security can erase the fact that voter suppression in Florida accelerated only after Trump claimed election fraud.
Taking their cue from Trump’s delusions, since 2021, Florida Republicans have fought to keep voters from being registered, disenfranchising citizens living paycheck to paycheck, minorities and college students. They sought to criminalize giving water to voters in long lines, and then they kneecapped voting by mail. Now they’re preparing to slice and dice Florida in a cynical redistricting plan to keep a rogue president safe from congressional oversight.
Given this unending crusade to keep people from casting ballots, the obvious question is what Republican legislators have against voting. The better question, though — and one Florida voters deserve an answer to — is, what do they have against democracy?
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. Contact us at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/02/11/before-you-can-vote-show-us-your-papers-editorial/
