HELENA — Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, the state’s top election official, says her office will use a federal government database to step up efforts to check registered voters for U.S. citizenship.
(Watch the video for more on how the Secretary of State's office is planning to check voters' citizenship status.)
Jacobsen’s office announced they would soon begin verifying voters’ citizenship status by checking the voter rolls against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
“Montanans have also made it clear that only citizens should be allowed to vote in our elections,” Jacobsen said in a statement. "Thanks to President Trump's leadership, Montana now has direct access at no cost to citizenship data that previous administrations refused to allow. Every eligible Montanan has the right to have their voice heard at the ballot box, and only those qualified and eligible should cast a ballot in our elections."
The Montana Constitution already says an eligible voter must be a U.S. citizen, and the state’s voter registration form requires people to certify that they are citizens. Jacobsen’s office says access to the SAVE database will give them more tools to confirm that.
SAVE is an online service through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which lets government agencies check a person’s information against data from sources like the Social Security Administration and U.S. naturalization services. It has previously been used to help verify people’s eligibility for things like federal benefits. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced it was changing SAVE policies to make it easier for states to use the system to check voter eligibility.
Jacobsen’s office says they plan to check all registered voters, not only a specific set of them. They say the work should be completed within the next year.
Some voting rights advocates have raised concerns about moves to expand the use of SAVE to check voters’ citizenship, arguing that the databases are not fully reliable and that there could be cases where a legitimate voter is mistakenly identified as a non-citizen.
The most recent widely reported claims of non-citizens voting in Montana came in 2022, when two people in the U.S. on work visas were charged with illegally registering and voting in the mayor’s race for Dodson, in Phillips County.
During the 2025 Montana Legislature session, there were two proposed bills on voter citizenship. Both failed to pass:
- Senate Bill 185, sponsored by Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, would have put a constitutional amendment before voters, to change the current statement that “any citizen” is an eligible voter to say “only a citizen” is an eligible voter. It got a majority in both the House and Senate but fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed.
- House Bill 286, sponsored by Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, would have directed the Secretary of State to create rules for determining a prospective voter’s citizenship status when they registered. It was tabled in a House committee.
If you want to check your registration status, you can use the Secretary of State’s “Voter Information Lookup” tool, available here.
