Louisiana Will Check Its Voter Rolls Against Federal Citizenship Records Every Year

How does a state find a noncitizen on its voter rolls without purging a citizen by mistake?

HB691 answers with three steps, and each one has its own check.

Once a year, the secretary of state must run every registrant, where the state has the needed data, through SAVE, the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. The check must be submitted more than 180 days before a regularly scheduled federal general election.

A possible noncitizen goes to the state's Division of Election Integrity. If the division finds the person may be a noncitizen, it sends its findings to the appropriate prosecutor for further investigation or prosecution.

Matches the division verifies go to the parish registrar, who challenges the registration under R.S. 18:193, the process Louisiana already uses to contest a voter's registration. A database hit alone cancels no one.

SAVE data must be handled in a secure environment under state and federal data protection standards. Each year the secretary of state reports how many records were checked, how many registrants were challenged, and how many registrations were cancelled as noncitizens. The checks continue only as long as the federal government lets Louisiana use SAVE for free, or the Legislature pays for it.

Picture a bank that flags a strange charge on your card. A good bank calls you before it closes the account. HB691 writes the phone call into the law. A federal database flag starts an investigation, and a cancellation has to go through the same challenge process as any other registration dispute.

First, the database makes mistakes, and the mistakes land on citizens. Texas ran its voter rolls through SAVE and flagged 2,724 people as potential noncitizens. After review, 578 of them proved they were citizens. For 506 of those, the problem was missing data: their passport information reached SAVE only after the state's first run. A naturalized citizen can also be flagged when Social Security still lists the person as a noncitizen because the record was never updated after naturalization. Those errors are why HB691's investigation step and formal challenge carry so much weight.

Second, the legal ground is still moving. The system HB691 depends on was rebuilt in 2025 so states could search by Social Security number and upload entire voter lists. On June 22, 2026, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the rebuild violated federal privacy law and shut it down for most states. On September 25, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court put that ruling on hold while the appeal continues, which lets the expanded system operate again for now. The final answer will come from the appeals courts.

Third, every check leaves a federal record. Under its 2025 records notice, DHS keeps SAVE verification records for 10 years and lists U.S.-born citizens among the people covered. An annual check of every Louisiana registrant the state has data for sends that voter's identifying information into a federal system that holds it for a decade. Americans have long refused a national ID. A national citizenship database built one state voter list at a time deserves the same scrutiny.

IPS supports HB691. Only citizens should vote, and this law checks for noncitizens every year with safeguards that protect eligible voters. IPS will also watch what the federal government does with the data Louisiana sends it.

Rep. Beau Beaullieu (R) sponsored HB691, with seven Senate coauthors. It passed the House 74-29 on March 31, 2026, and the Senate 28-8 on May 11. Governor Jeff Landry signed it May 15, 2026, as Act 6. It took effect August 1, 2026.

A yearly check, an investigation, and a formal challenge. Louisiana wrote all three into one statute. What happens to the data afterward is the next question.

This is our read of the law. We encourage you to read it yourself and reach your own conclusions.