Trump-backed SAVE Act is newest effort to collect private voter information

The administration is trying to consolidate state voter data into federal hands.

The Trump-backed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, or the SAVE America Act, as Republicans refer to it, is the administration's most recent effort to collect personal voter information, this time with a legal backing that could be more solid than previous attempts, an election rights lawyer told ABC News.

The GOP's signature piece of election reform, which requires voter ID at the ballot box and proof of citizenship to register, follows more than a year of continued efforts by the Trump administration to consolidate sensitive state voter data into federal hands.

The bill would mandate that states pull private information from the Social Security Administration, state identification cards and "other sources" that confirm citizenship status in an effort to root out potential non-citizen voters across the country, the bill text reads.

After the bill passed the House, the president has maintained the SAVE America Act must be passed through the Senate, going as far as refusing to sign the bipartisan housing bill passed by Congress until the SAVE Act was passed.

"It's like the Senate is a place that you send things when you want them to die. We can't do this, and we're not going to take this any longer," Trump said.

The effort has seen extensive legal challenges from voting rights groups and pushback from former government workers, arguing the country's founders never intended for election power to be consolidated in the executive branch. The founders wrote into the Constitution that states were responsible for administering elections.

"There is only one reason to oppose -- CHEATING!" Trump wrote on his social media platform.

A national citizenship registry, or national voter roll, is not a novel idea. Canada, for example, has required an eligible voter database to be maintained and updated since 1997.

The U.S. does not have a national registry of voters, instead delegating that power to the states, and would require a law passed by Congress to establish one.

The administration has instead pieced one together using the Department of Homeland Security's central SAVE database for immigration enforcement and data gathered from several government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration.

The Department of Justice also requested nearly every state's voter registration list, which "must include" sensitive information like the voter registrant's date of birth, residential address and the last four digits of the registrant's S