Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday afternoon signed into law the Florida SAVES Act, which will add new restrictions for voting and voter registration starting next year.
DeSantis and proponents of the law, which passed out of the Legislature earlier this year with Republican support, have argued that the changes will maintain election integrity.
Opponents, including voting rights advocates and Democrats, see the changes as burdensome paperwork that could disenfranchise or discourage hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from casting ballots.
Two coalitions of advocacy groups immediately filed separate suits over the new Florida law on Wednesday. DeSantis indicated he’s confident those efforts will fail.
“And you know what happens on all these: I sign it, they sue us, right?” DeSantis during a bill-signing event in The Villages. “They go to a liberal judge. The liberal judge sides with them. Then we appeal, and then we win.”
The Florida law mimics a similar piece of federal legislation, also called the SAVES Act, that President Donald Trump has championed and which has stalled in the U.S. Senate.
Among the changes in Florida’s SAVES Act are the following:
- New, replacement or renewed driver’s licenses or state ID cards must include their owner’s legal status. (Florida’s constitution already allows only U.S. citizens to vote in state elections, thanks to an amendment adopted in 2020.)
- Candidates will have to disclose any dual citizenship they possess.
- Several forms of ID that had previously been acceptable for voting and registration, including college IDs, no longer will be sufficient to vote.
- People registering to vote have to provide specific proof of citizenship if it is not automatically verified by the state. And if that person’s name was legally changed, they also have to provide that proof.
Democrats and the plaintiffs in Wednesday’s lawsuits both said that the limiting of valid ID and the need to prove citizenship with passports, birth certificates or other legal documents would disenfranchise students, the poor and elderly Black voters.
One of the suits, filed by a coalition of groups including the League of Women Voters and Hispanic and immigrant advocacy groups, argues that the requirements that voters show documentation and proof of citizenship could prevent voting by the elderly, eligible Puerto Ricans, people who have been homeless and students.
“Many voters will struggle or be entirely unable to produce the required documentation through no fault of their own,” the plaintiffs argued in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
“Elderly Black voters may lack necessary documentation if they were born outside of hospitals during the Jim Crow era and never issued a birth certificate. Due to a law invalidating Puerto Rican birth certificates issued before July 1, 2010, eligible voters born in Puerto Rico will struggle to provide DPOC (documentary proof of citizenship). Unhoused individuals, and people who previously were unhoused, may have lost their DPOC records. Students may lack easy access to any of the acceptable forms of DPOC specified in H.B. 991. And for all, it is unclear whether such documents could be submitted by mail or electronically.”
Advocates of the changes pointed out that more than 90% of Floridians already have REAL IDs, which will remain valid for voter registration next year.
Data from the state said that 20.6 million people in Florida had a REAL-ID-compliant driver’s license, State Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, told lawmakers, according to reporting by the Florida Phoenix.
The state counted 872,408 Floridians who did not have that valid form of identification, she said.
In 2025, the state identified 198 “likely noncitizens who illegally registered and/or voted in Florida,” according to a January 2026 report by the state Office of Election Crimes and Security. With more than 13 million people on Florida’s voter rolls, that’s a rate of less than 0.0015%.
