Proof of Citizenship

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stipulates that the right to vote in federal elections for the Senate, House of Representatives and presidency is limited to U.S. citizens.

With few exceptions, most state constitutions explicitly authorize only resident citizens to vote in state and local elections.

Currently, there is no state or national database or system to verify the citizenship of voters. Many states utilize self-reported citizenship information from non-citizen residents, but some use the national Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program database at the Department of Homeland Security to assist in verifying citizenship status. Several states attempting to prevent non-citizen voting have enacted laws requiring proof of U.S. citizenship of registrants when registering to vote.

Our current honor system on the part of registrants under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 includes a provision that created a federal voter registration form that requires applicants under penalty of perjury to check a “yes” or “no” box as to whether they are U.S. citizens. However, the federal form does not require any proof of citizenship, and its use has been shown to be ineffective in deterring non-citizens from registering to vote.

This issue has been hotly contested in the courts with advocates for this sensible safeguard against fraudulent voter registration up against a solid flank of left-wing groups such as Common Cause, Project Vote, the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In April 2015, the ACRU filed an amicus brief in Kobach v. United States Election Assistance Commission at the U.S. Supreme Court that included evidence that non-citizens in Texas were registering to vote using the federal form. On June 29, 2015, the Supreme Court denied Kansas’s and Arizona’s writ of certiorari petition, thus letting stand a 10th Circuit ruling that the states may not require applicants using the federal voter registration form to show documents proving citizenship when registering to vote in federal races.

ACRU Commentary

Obama Administration Fighting Efforts to Keep Non-Citizens from Voting

By Hans von Spakovsky Several well-funded organizations -- including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP -- are fighting efforts to prevent non-citizens from voting illegally in the upcoming presidential election. And the United States Department of Justice, under the direction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, is helping them. On February 12, these groups filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court seeking to reverse a recent decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The Commission's decision allows Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form. An initial hearing in the case is set for Monday afternoon, February 22. Under federal law, the EAC is responsible for designing the federal voter-registration form required by the National Voter Registration Act, or Motor Voter, as it is commonly called. While states must register voters who use the federal form, states can ask the EAC to include instructions with the federal form about additional state registration requirements. Some states are now requiring satisfactory proof of citizenship to ensure that only citizens register to vote.

Obama Is Importing a New Electorate

By Robert Knight The White House has doubled down on its efforts to use massive immigration for political advantage. On September 17, traditionally known as Constitution Day, the White House chose to highlight it as Citizenship Day, announcing a national campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to naturalize legal immigrants and turn them into millions of new voters by 2016. That's right. Tax dollars allotted to the agency responsible for safeguarding our borders and ensuring national security are being spent to facilitate a permanent political sea change next year. Reporting on the campaign, The New York Times noted that "about 60 percent of immigrants eligible to naturalize are Latino and about 20 percent are Asian, both groups that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama. Nearly a third of legal permanent residents eligible to naturalize are Mexican." Since 1980, the Hispanic vote differential for Democratic presidential candidates has never been less than 18 percent (Democrat John Kerry v. President George W. Bush in 2004) and has averaged 33 percent. With Hispanics making up more than 10 percent of the electorate and growing fast, this is no small advantage. Asian voters, who once were typically anti-communist, Southeast Asian refugees who voted overwhelmingly Republican, now heavily favor Democrats. In 2012, nearly three-quarters of Asian-American voters, who represent 3 percent of the electorate, voted for President Obama. These demographic trends bode well for Democrats, but for a White House looking to establish permanent, one-party rule, it is never enough. Hence, Homeland Security's campaign to naturalize 8.8 million green card holders as fast as possible. Last November, President Obama created the White House Task Force on New Americans "as part of a series of executive actions to fix our broken immigration system." J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney and a Policy Board member of the , wrote on April 23rd in PJMedia.com that, "DHS sources report that racial interest groups such as La Raza (translated to "The Race") and the American Immigration Lawyers Association have been playing a central and influential role in rewriting the administration's immigration policies - both the public policies as well as internal and largely unseen guidelines." The National Council of La Raza's former Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, Cecilia Munoz, an assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, co-chairs the Task Force on New Americans. "Her particular area of expertise is immigration policy, which she covered at NCLR [La Raza] for twenty years," says her White House web page. Her co-chair is Leon Rodriguez, who Mr. Adams said was "a central player in the radicalization of Eric Holder's Civil Rights Division." With the country divided almost equally between the two major parties, a massive voter infusion of newly coined citizens could easily tip the balance, which is why Democrats relentlessly press for immigration amnesty while their media allies label any resistance to unlimited immigration as "hate," "bigotry" and "xenophobia." DHS is funneling millions of tax dollars to groups that back amnesty and naturalization. The agency's Citizenship and Integration Grant Program has awarded $53 million through 262 competitive grants since 2009 to organizations in 35 states and the District of Columbia, according to its website. Major grant recipients include Catholic Charities in several cities as well as various ethnic pressure groups in major urban areas all over the country. One perennial $250,000 grantee, Make the Road New York, recently sponsored the Fourth Annual TransLatina March to protest "Homotransphobia." Over the past week, DHS's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offered practice tests on cellphones for citizenship tests, 70 workshops and 200 naturalization ceremonies. America is a land of immigrants. Even Native Americans probably emigrated from Asia. And America has benefited from millions of legal immigrants who play by the rules and seek better lives. Mr. Obama is importing and bribing a new electorate with government largesse in order to fundamentally transform the United States. Immigration per se is not the issue. The combination of lawless immigration with ruthless political calculation, is. * Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the and a Washington Times contributor.

Fixing Elections, Automatically

By Robert Knight If you think that the politicians who now run our government are bad, how about a system with leaders chosen by people too lazy even to register to vote? That's the goal of leftist groups that are pushing "automatic registration" while opposing common-sense election safeguards like photo voter ID laws and citizenship requirements. The process got going in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed his first piece of legislation, the National Voter Registration Act, better known as Motor Voter. That law mandates ease of registry to vote at state departments of motor vehicles and other government agencies, such as welfare offices. But people still have to bother to sign up. Automatic registration, otherwise known as "universal registration" was adopted in March in Oregon, where Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and the Democratic-led legislature approved the nation's first "opt-out" registration system. On the heels of that victory, progressives in 17 states and the District of Columbia, plus both houses of Congress, introduced similar bills. In June, Hillary Clinton floated the idea of automatically registering all 18-year-olds. California's Democratically-controlled Senate enacted the California New Motor Voter Program on Sept. 10, followed by the House on Sept. 11. Gov. Jerry Brown was expected to sign it. Under the new law, all adult citizens who get a driver's license, renew a license, obtain a state identification card, or file a change of address form with the Department of Motor Vehicles will be automatically registered to vote. As with Oregon's law, people can opt out. For now. Euthanasia-loving Oregon, which is keeping one step ahead of California as a fount for progressive activism on the Left Coast, had already adopted via referendum an all-mail-in ballot system in 1998. Mandating automatic registration is just the latest wrinkle. The next inevitable "reform" - mandatory voting - was mentioned by President Obama last March during a town hall in Cleveland, where he said, "Other countries have mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted - that would counteract money more than anything." So, people who can't be bothered to register or to vote and don't have even a minimal grasp of American constitutional government would be forced to vote. Qui bono? Obviously, the party that sustains the Free Stuff Army, whose growth to a tipping point could end the American experiment in liberty and self-government. This would certainly qualify as "transformative." The national campaign for automatic registration is led by a group called FairVote, which is funded by left-leaning organizations that include the Ford Foundation, the Herb Block Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros' Open Society Institute. Based in the hippie town of Takoma Park, Maryland, where FairVote led a successful fight to change the law in 2013 to allow 16-year-olds to vote in municipal elections, FairVote is also pushing to destroy the constitutionally required Electoral College and replace it with a National Popular Vote in presidential elections. This would make smaller states meaningless in presidential campaigns (talk about "flyover country") and create a huge incentive for even more vote fraud in major cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, where stuffing ballot boxes is second nature. In addition to advocating a national voting age of 16, FairVote wants "a comprehensive 'voting curriculum.'" Imagine for a moment what will be served up to high school students, who are already immersed in a progressive stew of moral relativism, climate change hysteria, revisionist history, sexual "liberation" and increasingly stringent political correctness. It's not for nothing that SAT critical reading scores have hit their lowest average in 40 years, and the lowest math scores in 16 years. Teachers are too busy brainwashing kids into the New Political Order to bother much with math and English. No wonder the left wants 16-year-olds to vote before they fully develop their cautionary adult natures. For good measure, FairVote also supports the misnamed Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, which would undo the Supreme Court's historic Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 that struck down an outdated portion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). FairVote employs an outrageous lie, saying that the effect of the Shelby ruling is "stripping the Justice Department of the powers it had for five decades to curb racial discrimination in voting." Nonsense. All the Shelby ruling did was to end the anachronistic system by which Southern states and several other jurisdictions were under special scrutiny of the Justice Department and a D.C.-based federal court panel. The high court noted that Jim Crow was long dead and that the VRA categories were based on now-irrelevant 50-year-old data. Meanwhile, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is still "a permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting. It bans intentional discrimination as well as discriminatory 'results' based on a court's review of the 'totality of the circumstances' under which it occurred," according to the Heritage Foundation.

Evenwel v. Abbott

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to determine whether only citizens get a political voice in America. WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 5, 2015) —- In a brief submitted today at the U.S. Supreme Court, the ACRU [...]

New York’s Expanding Electorate

"Start spreading the news I'm voting today " If the Democratic Party and its constituent groups have their way, the Big Apple's non-citizen immigrants will be singing that variation on the Sinatra anthem "New York, New York" at the polls next year. That's the plan, as outlined at a recent press conference announcing the "Engaging Immigrant New York City" campaign, which its organizers call "an initiative to mobilize immigrant New Yorkers in preparation for the 2016 Presidential elections." This is exactly the kind of grass-roots activism envisioned by billionaire George Soros, who has committed $5 million to expand the electorate and loosen voting requirements by getting rid of photo ID laws and other recent election reforms. Increasingly, citizenship -- a prime condition for voting -- is being treated as an annoying speed bump on the way to the election booth. President Obama's Justice Department has even sued Kansas and Arizona over their laws requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Although New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has not publicly embraced the idea of registering non-citizens, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has gone on record supporting legislation to allow legal residents who are not citizens to vote in city elections, according to capitalnewyork.com.

Meet the Federal Bureaucrat Who Stopped Kansas from Preventing Foreigners from Voting

The Supreme Court has been asked to allow Kansas and Arizona to verify that only United States citizens are registering to vote in those states. Unfortunately, a single federal bureaucrat refused to allow Kansas and Arizona to weed out non-citizens trying to register to vote. Meet Alice Miller, the Acting Director of the Election Assistance Commission. Walker alone, sitting in her inside-the-Beltway office, refused to amend the Kansas and Arizona version of a federal voter registration form to include state laws requiring proof of citizenship. Backed by a swarm of left wing groups, Miller, by herself, made it easier for foreigners to vote in Kansas and Arizona.