Republicans fight for citizenship law that would change elections

One of the top priorities of Republicans in Congress is to prevent non-citizen participation in elections – a problem that Democrats say does not even exist.

With the 2024 election approaching, Republicans say this is causing increasing concern among their voters and that a federal crackdown is the best way to address those concerns.

The solution, Republicans say, lies in passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE Act), a citizenship proof law that Democrats largely oppose. The bill is doomed to fail in the Democratic-dominated Senate, but Republican leaders in the House have made passage of a temporary funding bill to prevent a government shutdown their only condition.

As that battle plays out in Congress this week, some legal and policy experts have also spoken out in favor of the SAVE Act, arguing that it would, in practice, improve election security.

“This is what we need,” Chad Ennis, a longtime attorney and vice president of the Honest Elections Project, told the Washington Examiner. “We need to require that when you register to vote, as Arizona has tried to do, you also prove that you are a citizen as part of your qualifications.”

The SAVE law is a “mainstream ideal”

The SAVE Act brings together two issues that dominate the Republican Party: secure elections and immigration.

Since 2020, Republicans have been particularly sensitive to electoral fraud. In the last presidential election, former President Donald Trump narrowly lost after many states relaxed their election laws in an emergency under the pretext of Covid-19.

In addition, the Biden administration has been characterized in part by exorbitant numbers of illegal immigration. Federal data shows that since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office, more than 5.6 million migrants who entered the country illegally have been released into the United States, often under the promise that they would appear in immigration court at a later date.

Federal law prohibits all noncitizens from voting, whether they are in the country legally or illegally. However, noncitizens regularly appear on voter rolls, known as “voter rolls,” heightening concerns about whether they can even vote in a federal election.

The SAVE Act, backed by Trump, would require voters registering to show proof that they are U.S. citizens when registering. Currently, they only have to check a box confirming their citizenship. The bill would also give election officials greater access to federal databases that states currently have to pay to use.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose told Congress in a hearing last week that his office identified nearly 600 noncitizens registered to vote last year alone. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) recently announced that careful purges have removed 6,303 noncitizens from Virginia's voter rolls since January 2022. Other states, including Texas and Oregon, have also recently discovered noncitizens on their voter rolls.

LaRose described “list maintenance” as one of the “most important tasks” of a government administration and warned that sloppy voter lists opened the door to voter fraud by non-citizens.

There are few documented cases of noncitizens voting at all. According to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation and Justice Department records, there have been a few dozen cases of noncitizens voting over the past two decades. Studies by the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, have found that cases of noncitizens voting are so rare compared to the millions of eligible voters who cast ballots that their impact is negligible.

But Republicans in the House of Representatives, who held two hearings on the issue last week, have repeatedly asked their Democratic colleagues why they oppose stricter enforcement of the law, even though studies show that it would not change the outcome of the election.

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, a Republican from a border state, told the Washington Examiner He said he “absolutely” supports the SAVE Act and that the Democrats’ opposition to it is “instructive.”

“They refused to support the popular ideal and argued there was no problem,” Issa said. “But after just a quick check, we know that non-citizens have been voting in our elections. My constituents tell me that illegal voting is a problem because it is wrong, and we now know it is not the hoax that Democrats claimed.”

A senior Republican aide noted that Democrats viewed the election law “the way a major corporation views the tax code.”

“Every rule, every regulation and even every word should be exploited to the maximum extent possible,” the adviser said, noting that requiring proof of citizenship in advance would block one opportunity for such exploitation.

Case Study Arizona

Arizona, a state that has suffered from illegal immigration for years, is unique in that it is the only state offering insight into the impact of the SAVE Act on the electoral process.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the “Motor Voter” law, required all states to use a common federal form to register their citizens.

However, Arizona offers an unusual state registration form in addition to the required federal form, resulting in a two-tiered voter registration system. The state form requires a registrant to provide documented proof of citizenship, while the federal form is the standard form offered nationwide that only includes a check box. If the voter registers using the federal form without documented proof of citizenship, he or she can only vote in federal elections and not in state or local elections.

The state form was the centerpiece of a recent Supreme Court legal battle in which Ennis' group and the Republican National Committee urged the Supreme Court to leave the state form option intact. Democrats and the Justice Department fought against it. The Supreme Court sided with Republicans on the form issue but rejected other provisions.

Court documents released as part of the lawsuit revealed that about 42,000 people had registered federally without being able to provide proof of citizenship. A study found that many of those registrants were concentrated in areas of college campuses, suggesting they were students.

At last week's hearings, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat elected to the Senate, sharply criticized his state's system, accusing it of disenfranchising citizens. He warned that the SAVE Act would lead to even greater disenfranchisement.

Fontes said the state's attempt to address what he said was “the vanishingly rare occurrence of noncitizens voting” resulted in what he determined was at least 47,000 eligible Arizona voters being denied the right to vote.

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Ennis said disenfranchisement was the “same argument [Democrats] is used with voter ID. It's the same argument they use with virtually everything.” He added that states should focus their efforts on helping eligible voters, such as college students in transit, obtain proof of their citizenship.

“If someone doesn't have documents proving their citizenship, we should help them get those documents,” Ennis said. “That's a document that you need in this country. So those are things that we can easily work around and solve.”