The Supreme Court will consider the legality of two Arizona laws requiring prospective voters to produce proof of citizenship to register, the court announced on Monday.
The court’s acceptance of the case for its term that begins in October opens a new front in the justices’ review of rules around voting and federal elections, including the consideration of race when drawing congressional districts and a Mississippi state law governing mail-in ballots.
It also means the justices will be wading into an issue that has become a pivotal fight for the Trump administration. President Trump has forcefully pushed for proof-of-citizenship requirements to vote, taking executive actions to demand voter rolls containing personal information from states and pushing for the creation of state-by-state citizenship lists. He also has nearly ground Congress’s legislative work to a halt over demands for a bill that would include such requirements.
Federal law already limits voting in federal elections to U.S. citizens, and there is no evidence that illegal voting by migrants is a major problem. A review of 49.5 million voter registrations nationwide found roughly 10,000 registered noncitizen voters, about two-hundredths of a percent.
While the new Supreme Court case does not directly address the role of the federal government, it could lead to states being granted additional power to police their own voter rolls.
The laws at issue were passed in 2022 by Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature as Mr. Trump ramped up his false claims of rampant voter fraud around the 2020 presidential election. They require new voters who are registering with a state form to provide a birth certificate, U.S. passport, driver’s license or other official documents as proof of citizenship. A district court judge blocked the requirement, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that ruling last year.
In addition to the proof of citizenship requirement, the justices will weigh whether Arizona can cancel the registration of voters who it believes to be not U.S. citizens within 90 days of a federal election. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 gives states a 90-day deadline for purging voter rolls, but the Republican National Committee, which brought the case, has argued that provision does not apply to foreign nationals.
In a temporary ruling, the Supreme Court previously left in place a purge of voter rolls by Virginia officials. It also issued a temporary ruling in 2024 that allowed Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement to take effect. That order was decided 5 to 4, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
The case is one of six that the Supreme Court added to its calendar on Monday for the next term. Among the others is a lawsuit over whether the parents of runaway children have a right to know when their offspring are undergoing gender-transition treatments.
