Sen. Ashley Moody, anti-voting hardliner, wins Florida GOP primary for U.S. Senate

Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), a staunch ally of President Donald Trump who has aggressively supported voter-suppression efforts, won Florida’s Republican primary Tuesday in a special election for the U.S. Senate this November.

Since being appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in 2025, Moody has consistently supported restrictive voting legislation based on false claims that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread in U.S. elections.

Measures Moody has supported include Trump’s SAVE America Act, which she co-sponsored when it was introduced in the Senate earlier this year. If passed, it would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters by requiring them to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.

Before joining the Senate, Moody served as Florida’s attorney general. In that role, she sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2024 to force the federal government to verify the immigration or citizenship status of people registered on the state’s voter roll. 

DHS settled the lawsuit after Trump returned to the White House. As part of the settlement, it gave the states access to its SAVE system. Short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, SAVE was originally designed to help government agencies verify immigration status for public benefits, not voter eligibility. 

To carry out Trump’s first anti-voting executive order from March 2025, the Trump administration has sought to greatly expand SAVE into a much broader tool to police state voter rolls by combining it with the Social Security Administration’s data. 

Trump officials have also attempted to pressure states into feeding their voter rolls through the SAVE program, despite voting experts warning that the database has repeatedly falsely identified eligible voters — particularly naturalized citizens — as noncitizens. 

A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the use of the SAVE program to remove voters from the registration rolls, finding that DHS violated privacy laws by “haphazardly” combining the private information of millions of Americans while expanding the program.

However, the lawsuit Moody filed in 2024 is now being used to preserve access to the expanded SAVE database in Florida and in Indiana, Ohio and Iowa, which also joined the suit.

As attorney general, Moody also called on Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a progenitor of the SAVE America Act that passed the House but died in the Senate.