State lawmakers expressed confidence that ballot initiatives to ensure that only citizens vote will win “overwhelming” support—including in two battleground states.
North Carolina and Wisconsin—where polls are tight in the presidential race and have been close in recent statewide contests—will be voting on the matter. Other states with citizen-only voting referendums are red states Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
“Most people in our state think that only American citizens can vote anyway. So, they already believe that’s the case. They believe that’s the way it should be, and they’ll have an opportunity to weigh in on it Nov. 5,” Wisconsin state Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican, told The Daily Signal after a news conference Wednesday.
Bradley was in Washington with other lawmakers from several states to promote ballot measures at an event sponsored by Americans for Citizen Voting.
All this comes as Congress considers adding a House-passed bill requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration to an omnibus spending bill.
Some municipalities and counties across the country have granted noncitizens the right to vote in local elections, such as for mayor or school board. Election security advocates have expressed concerns about the ability of local governments to keep separate voting lists to prevent them from also voting for statewide and federal offices.
It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and in most states. Yet, several states make illegal immigrants eligible for driver’s licenses and other benefits, providing ample opportunities for them also to register to vote illegally in federal elections, critics note.
The Wisconsin state Legislature voted along party lines to put the measure on the ballot, but Bradley said the measure has polled at 76% support among voters.
“I hope to beat that, but I’ll take 76%, especially if you look at a battleground state like Wisconsin. You had a gubernatorial election decided by 20,000 votes in 2018, presidential election in 2020, the presidential election in 2016, in 2022, I think our attorney general, our secretary of state, a lot of statewide elections were decided by 20,000 or less votes,” Bradley added. “So, to be able to have a question go before the people that could pass overwhelmingly, that’s a big deal.”
In most of the eight states, the ballot language would change their state constitution to say “every” citizen can vote to “only” citizens can vote.
“That’s important, because we’ve seen a couple of court cases which have used that term ‘every’ as a permissive term,” North Carolina state Sen. Brad Overcash, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “So, we’re going to have a chance to change that from ‘every’ to ‘only.’”
Overcash anticipates the measure will pass easily in North Carolina, even though many elections have been close in the state.
“Even when we presented it in the legislature, it got some pushback from some Democrats, but it still passed on a bipartisan basis,” Overcash said. “I think the voters are going to overwhelmingly support this.”
Georgia doesn’t have a ballot measure, but already has citizenship verification, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
He noted that Fair Fight Action, an organization founded by twice-unsuccessful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and the liberal group Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda sued to prevent citizenship verification in Georgia. Georgia won both cases.
“We primarily used the Department of Driver Service. The beautiful thing about Driver Services is they are Real ID compliant, so they have to check citizenship,” Raffensperger told The Daily Signal. “They actually do a lot of background work to say if this person has qualified, if they are a lawful citizen.”
“We did a citizenship audit. We found about 1,600 people, voters, that attempted to register, but couldn’t verify citizenship,” Raffensperger said. “We are doing our second audit right now. We should have our results shortly.”
As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” there have been numerous adjudicated cases of foreign nationals registering to vote and voting in past elections.
The two Georgia-based groups aren’t the only left-leaning organizations opposing measures to stop noncitizen voting.
The Brennan Center—a liberal think tank based at New York University that routinely opposes election security measures, such as voter ID requirements, and generally denies the existence of election irregularities—also opposes additional citizen-only voting measures.
“It’s worth saying, once again, that the notion of widespread noncitizen voting is a lie,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote last month on the organization’s website. “An urban myth. It’s simply not true. States have a multiplicity of systems in place to prevent it from happening. Noncitizen voting is illegal four times over, and the reality is that it’s incredibly rare.”
Meanwhile, many House Republicans are calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to include the SAVE Act in the fiscal-year-end omnibus spending legislation.
Short for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act—the “motor voter law”—to require that states obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before anyone can register to vote.
Asked about the push to include the measure in the omnibus bill, Raffensperger told The Daily Signal, “That’s a Congress question.”
He added:
I just believe we need to make sure that only Americans vote in our elections. I think that Georgia makes a great model.
Other state lawmakers didn’t hold back.
“I would love for elected officials to go on the record and say we want noncitizen voting in our elections so people will see what they are really doing,” Oklahoma state Sen. Shane Jett, a Republican, said during the news conference. “In Oklahoma, we have a balanced-budget amendment. A lot of the people that didn’t support this amendment weren’t invited to come back to the Capitol by their own constituents who wanted them to come home and think about their life choices. So, go on the record.”
South Carolina state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, a Republican, said ensuring that only citizens vote could be worth a potential government shutdown.
“If Democrats want to shut down the federal government over letting noncitizens vote, I think that’s a losing issue,” Kimbrell said, adding:
Let them do it. You can’t blame Speaker Johnson for shutting down the government if Democrats in the Senate refuse to defend the integrity of elections. There is overwhelming support for these referendums, overwhelming support for the SAVE Act, if you really hear what’s in it. When you talk about defending citizens-only voting, both parties, it’s double-digit leads.
Prior referendums on the subject have done well in other states. In 2022, constitutional amendments requiring citizenship to vote were approved by 73% of voters in Louisiana and 77% in Ohio, according to Ballotpedia. In 2020, similar constitutional amendments were approved by 79% of voters in Florida; 77% in Alabama; and 62% in Colorado, a blue state. In 2018, 65% of voters in North Dakota approved such an amendment.
