For the third time since Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s SAVE Act into law in April, advocacy groups are back in federal court trying to stop a law that hasn’t even taken effect yet.

The latest suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of the Black Voters Matter Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens. Unlike the two lawsuits that preceded it, this one leans on the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, arguing the state law’s citizenship-verification process conflicts with federal minimum standards for voter roll maintenance.

The law itself, known formally as House Bill 991, does one thing plainly: it requires voters to document that they are, in fact, U.S. citizens. It also directs the state to cross-check registrations against government databases and give voters 30 days to respond before removal from the rolls. It does not take effect until January 1, 2027.

That hasn’t stopped opponents from treating it as an emergency. Democracy Defenders Fund attorney Andrew Warren argued the law does nothing to improve election security and instead makes voting harder for people who lack certain paperwork, calling it an accommodation to “conspiracy theorists” rather than a genuine safeguard. It’s a striking accusation to level at a policy whose stated purpose is the one thing nearly every voter says they want: confidence that only eligible citizens are casting ballots.

DeSantis, for his part, has made his rationale no secret. Protecting the integrity of the state’s voter rolls, he has said, has been a top priority of his administration since his first days in office — a stance no serious critique of the SAVE Act has managed to undercut with an actual example of the law preventing an eligible citizen from voting.

Critics counter that citizenship documentation could pose a real burden for voters who have changed their last name, whose citizenship status changed over time, or who simply lack easy access to the required paperwork — concerns worth weighing seriously. But it’s worth noting that none of the three lawsuits filed against the SAVE Act challenge the underlying premise that voters must be citizens. They argue only over how strictly that fact should be verified, which is a considerably narrower fight than the “disenfranchisement” rhetoric surrounding the case suggests.

The SPLC and Democracy Defenders Fund previously represented plaintiffs in a similar case against a Kansas proof-of-citizenship law that a court eventually struck down, and they point to that precedent, along with a New Hampshire law they say turned away up to 30% of new registrants, as evidence Florida’s law could produce the same outcome here.

Whether Florida’s law fares differently in court than Kansas’s now rests with a federal judge. With three lawsuits pending and more than a year before the law takes effect, this fight is only getting started — and taxpayers will be funding the state’s defense of it the entire way.

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