WASHINGTON – The House on Wednesday passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, a proposal Republicans have prioritized as an election-year talking point even as research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare.
The legislation, approved largely along partisan lines but with five Democrats voting in favor, is unlikely to advance through the Democratic-led Senate. The Biden administration also says it’s strongly opposed because there already are safeguards to enforce the law against noncitizen voting.
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Still, the House vote will give Republicans an opportunity to bring attention to two of their central issues this year — border and election security.
It also provides an opportunity to fuel former President Donald Trump’s claims that Democrats have encouraged the surge of migrants so they can register them to vote, which would be illegal. Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, nor is it allowed for any statewide elections.
Research and audits in several states show there have been incidences of noncitizens who successfully registered to vote and cast ballots, but it happens rarely and is typically by mistake. States have mechanisms to check for it, although there isn’t one standard protocol they all follow.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, a key backer of the bill, said in a news conference earlier this week that the Democratic opposition means many Democrats “want illegals to participate in our federal elections; they want them to vote.”
During a speech Wednesday, he called the vote a “generation-defining moment."
“If just a small percentage, a fraction of a fraction of all those illegals that Joe Biden has brought in here to vote, if they do vote, it wouldn't just change one race,” he said. “It might potentially change all of our races.”
On his Truth Social platform this week, Trump suggested that Democrats are pushing to give noncitizen migrants the right to vote and urged Republicans to pass the legislation — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — or “go home and cry yourself to sleep.”
The fixation on noncitizen voting is part of a broader and long-term Trump campaign strategy of casting doubt on the validity of an election should he lose, and he has consistently pushed that narrative during his campaign rallies this year. Last month in Las Vegas, he told supporters, “The only way they can beat us is to cheat.” It also is part of a wider Republican campaign strategy, with GOP lawmakers across the country passing state legislation and putting noncitizen voting measures on state ballots for November.
One Democrat who voted for the GOP bill, Rep. Vincente Gonzalez, said he only did so because the bill was doomed in the Senate.
“It’s not going anywhere,” said Gonzalez, who represents a competitive border district in Texas. “It’s just another Republican messaging bill.”
The majority of Democrats and voting rights advocates have said the legislation is unnecessary because it’s already a felony for noncitizens to register to vote in federal elections, punishable by fines, prison or deportation. Anyone registering must attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen. Noncitizens also are not allowed to cast ballots at the state level. A handful of municipalities allow them to vote in some local elections.
They also have pointed to surveys showing that millions of Americans don’t have easy access to up-to-date documentary proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, naturalization certificate or passport, and therefore the bill could inhibit U.S. citizen voters who aren’t able to further prove their status.
During the Wednesday floor debate, Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, expressed concern that the bill would disenfranchise various American citizens.
He mentioned military members stationed abroad who couldn't show documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office, as well as married women whose names have changed, Native Americans whose tribal IDs don't show their place of birth and natural disaster survivors who have lost their personal documents.
Morelle said he doesn't see the bill as an attempt to maintain voter rolls, but as part of larger GOP-led plans to question the validity of the upcoming election.
“The false claim that there is a conspiracy to register noncitizens is a pretext for trying to overturn the 2024 election, potentially leading to another tragedy on January 6th, 2025,” he said.
Yet Republicans who support the bill contend the unprecedented surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border creates too large a risk of noncitizens slipping through the cracks and casting ballots that sway races in November.
“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a legal American citizen,” said Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the Republican chair of the House Administration Committee.
If passed, the bill would require noncitizens to be removed from state voter rolls and require new applicants to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. It also would require states to establish a process for applicants who can’t show proof to provide other evidence beyond their attestation of citizenship, though it’s unclear what that evidence could include.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose recently found 137 suspected noncitizens on the state’s rolls — out of roughly 8 million voters — and said he was taking action to confirm and remove them.
In 2022, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, conducted an audit of his state’s voter rolls specifically looking for noncitizens. His office found that 1,634 had attempted to register to vote over a period of 25 years, but election officials had caught all the applications and none had been able to register.
In North Carolina in 2016, an audit of elections found that 41 legal immigrants who had not yet become citizens cast ballots, out of 4.8 million total ballots cast. The votes didn’t make a difference in any of the state’s elections.
In a document supporting the bill, Johnson listed other examples of noncitizens who had been removed from the rolls in Boston and Virginia.
Several secretaries of state, interviewed during their summer conference in Puerto Rico this week, said noncitizens attempting to register and vote is not a big problem in their state.
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections, said she supports the legislation in concept but provided a cautionary tale about how aggressively culling voter rolls can sometimes result in the removal of qualified voters.
A few years ago, everyone in her household received mail ballots for a municipal election, except her. She had been removed from the rolls because she had been born in the Netherlands, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force.
“I was the lieutenant governor, I was overseeing elections, and I got taken off because I was born in the Netherlands,” she said, “So I think we definitely have those checks and balances in the state of Utah, maybe to an extreme.”
The House vote comes days after the Republican National Committee released its party platform, which emphasizes border security and takes a stand against Democrats giving “voting rights” to migrants living in the country illegally. Republicans are expected to shine a light on immigration and election integrity concerns at the Republican National Convention next week in Milwaukee.
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Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.
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