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

Growing Evidence that Non-Citizens Are Voting

Noncitizens are registering to vote and at best, it seems the federal government's officials don't care about this illegal activity. At worst, it raises questions whether some in Washington support illegal voting, so long as it supports their political agenda. The exact number of noncitizens who are voting in our elections is difficult to quantify because of the bureaucratic quagmire perpetuated by federal agencies against the (very few) states that have the resolve to attempt to verify citizenship. Federal agencies responsible for immigration and naturalization routinely fight efforts to compare voter rolls with lists of known noncitizens. Yet evidence of noncitizen voting mounts. The just filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court documenting instance after instance of noncitizens registering and voting. It urges the Court to take up a petition for certiorari filed by Kansas and Arizona seeking to overturn a bad decision on this issue by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Making It Easy to Cheat

On a host of electoral integrity issues, the liberal position can be summarized in two words: enable cheating. You think that's too harsh? How else to explain the race-baiting rhetoric from President Obama on down against something as common-sense as voter photo ID laws, which the public supports by wide margins? Or the intense drive for Election Day registration, mail-in voting and earlier and earlier balloting, all of which make it harder to detect and prevent vote fraud? Or the opposition to any law ensuring that only citizens can vote? A case in point of the latter is the Obama administration's stiff-arming of two states that want to require proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. Kansas and Arizona, which already require proof of citizenship on state election forms, asked the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to include a requirement for proof of citizenship on the federal form. Backed by the Obama Justice Department, the EAC declined. The two states sued, won in U.S. District Court, but saw the verdict overturned in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, the case is heading for the U.S. Supreme Court. In a brief submitted this past week asking the court to take the case, the provided key evidence -- federal voter registration forms -- exposing the shocking ease with which noncitizens can register to vote without any proof of citizenship.

Kobach v. U.S. Election Assistance Commission

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 21, 2015) – Non-citizens are registering to vote under current federal law, as shown in documents submitted today by the to the U.S. Supreme Court. The brief asks the high court to [...]

Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn't reside. (She hasn't entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying--a practice that the local district attorney said had too long "been accepted as part of life" there. Now come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote won't count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?

DOJ Absent from Blatant Voting Bias Case

Judge Ramona Manglona of the federal district court for the Northern Mariana Islands just threw out a blatantly unconstitutional provision of the territorial government that strictly limited registration and voting for a referendum to only those "persons of Northern Marianas descent." The Constitution of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) defines persons of Northern Marianas descent as those who are "at least one-quarter Northern Marianas Chamorro or Northern Marianas Carolinian blood or a combination thereof or an adopted child of a person of Northern Marianas descent if adopted while under the age of eighteen years." One is considered a "full-blooded" Chamorro or Carolinian if "born or domiciled" in the territory by 1950. There is no question that CNMI's voting prohibitions are racially discriminatory. In fact, they are reminiscent of the odious "one-drop rule" of racial segregation codes or the First Regulation to the Reichs Citizenship Law of Nov. 14, 1935, which similarly defined Jews based on their ancestry. Yet John Davis was forced to bring this suit at his own expense, with his own lawyer, because the Justice Department was nowhere to be found. It had no interest in filing a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act against a blatantly discriminatory and repugnant law that prevented John Davis from voting because he doesn't have the right "blood" quantum.

Big Win for Electoral Integrity in Arizona, Kansas

In a big victory for election integrity, Arizona and Kansas -- led by their Secretaries of State, Ken Bennett and Kris Kobach -- have obtained an order from a federal judge allowing them to enforce their proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration. In a decision issued on March 19, Judge Eric Melgren of the federal district court of Kansas found that the refusal of federal election authorities to add state-specific instructions to the federal voter-registration form notifying residents of Arizona and Kansas that they have to provide proof that they are U.S. citizens to complete their registration is "unlawful and in excess of its statutory authority."