TOPEKA, Kan. — Republicans made illegal claims the vote of non-citizens 2024 axis campaign messaging and plan push for legislation Provide proof of US citizenship to voters in the new Congress. However, there is one place with a GOP majority where tying voting to citizenship seems like a non-starter: Kansas.
Because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go again. Kansas enacted a proof-of-citizenship requirement more than a decade ago, which became one of the state’s biggest political fiascos in recent memory.
The law, enacted two years after the state Legislature passed it in 2011, ended up blocking the voter registration of more than 31,000 US citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. It was 12% of all first-time registrants in Kansas. Federal courts eventually ruled the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it has not been enforced since 2018
Kansas, in fact, offers a cautionary tale about how to pursue an election concern very rare there is a risk of excluding many more people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a lawmaker and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t turn out so well.”
Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his mind, the statue was like a store owner who is afraid of being robbed and locks up. But in 2014, after the birth of her now 11-year-old son prompted her to be “a little more responsible” and pursue politics, she didn’t have an acceptable copy of her birth certificate to register to vote in Kansas.
“The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state. “You caught a bunch of people who did nothing wrong.”
Kansas’s experience appears to have received little attention outside the state, as Republicans elsewhere this year implemented proof-of-citizenship requirements.
Arizona he set a condition this year, applying to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or the presidency. The Republican-led US House passed citizenship verification requirement this summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP wins control of the Senate in November.
in Ohio, Secretary of State of the Republic Revised the form poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require non-US born naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge refused to block the practice days before the election.
Similarly, large majorities of voters in the presidential swing states of Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to change the voting provisions of their state constitutions, even if the changes were symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all US citizens could vote now say that only US citizens can vote – a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible.
To be clear, voters must prove they are already US citizens when they register to vote and non-citizens can face fines, jail time and deportation if they are caught lying.
“There is nothing constitutional that says only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, the lead sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email to The Associated Press.
After Kansas residents challenged their state law, a federal judge and a federal district court concluded that they violated the law that limited the state to collecting the minimum information needed to determine whether a person is eligible to vote. That is a problem that Congress can solve.
Courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of a real problem, Kansas could not justify a law that prevented hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for each improperly registered citizen. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 citizens registered to vote between 1999 and 2012, an average of just three a year.
In 2013, then Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who built a national reputation by advocating tough immigration laws, described the opportunity to vote. Immigrants living in the US illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly supports the idea that the federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost got it wrong.”
Kobach also said a key issue in the legal case — the inability of people to resolve issues with their records within a 90-day window — has likely been resolved.
“The technological challenge of how well you can verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.”
US Supreme Court Kansas refused to hear the case in 2020 But in August, that Split 5-4 Allowing Arizona to continue enforcing the voting law in state and local elections while the legal challenge moves forward.
With the possibility of another Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should enforce proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was Kansas’ attorney general when his state’s law was challenged.
“If the same issue arose and was litigated now, the facts would be different,” he said in an interview.
But voting rights advocates reject the idea that a legal case would play out any other way. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court battle.
“We know people we can call,” Johnson said. “We know we have expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted a “litigation push against it – a landslide.”
At first, the impacts of the Kansas requirement seemed likely to fall on the politically unaffiliated and young voters. In the fall of 2013, 57% of voters blocked from registering were unaffiliated and 40% were under 30.
But Fish was in his mid-30s, and six of the nine residents who sued the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three also submitted citizenship documents and were not yet registered, according to court documents.
“There was not a single one of us that was illegal or misrepresented or misrepresented any information or did anything wrong,” Fish said.
He was supposed to present his birth certificate when he tried to register in 2014, renewing his Kansas driver’s license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. No employee would accept Fish’s copy of his birth certificate. He still doesn’t know where to find the original, as he was born at an Air Force base in Illinois that was closed in the 1990s.
Joining Fish in the lawsuit were several veterans, all of whom were born in the U.S., and Fish said he was surprised they could prevent him from registering.
Liz Azore, a senior adviser at the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans have not traveled outside the U.S. and don’t have passports they can use as proof of citizenship, or don’t have easy access to their birth certificates.
He and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make the proof-of-citizenship law work more smoothly than it did in Kansas a decade ago.
“It’s going to take a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It will disenfranchise large parts of the country.”
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Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
