Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson Propose to Require Voters to Show Proof of Citizenship
Here's How Democrats Can Respond to Affirmatively Increase Voter Turnout
Speaking at a joint press conference on Friday, April 12, Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson proposed that all people be required to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Media organizations were quick to fact check claims made at the conference, noting:
Noncitizen voting is already illegal in federal elections. Every states’ voter registration form requires applicants to swear an oath they are citizens.
Penalties are high for committing the felony of registering as a noncitizen, including jail time and deportation.
There are few instances of noncitizen voting. A Brennan Center review of the 2016 election found 30 instances.
When noncitizens are found to have voted, states almost always take no enforcement action because the noncitizen was mistakenly told by a government official that they were eligible to vote, such as a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
A Broken Citizenship Verification System
This new call for documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) is an evolution of a 2018 tweet by Trump that all voters be required to show photo identification when voting. Now that nearly all red states have adopted photo identification laws, the goal posts have been moved again to require documentary proof of citizenship.
I have been an expert witness in litigation challenging three states’ documentary proof of citizenship requirements — Arizona, Georgia, and Kansas. I know quite a bit about how such a policy works in practice and who would be harmed by it.
The Kansas system comes closest to Trump’s proposal. There, in the case Fish v. Kobach, a federal court overturned Kansas’ law which required all registrants to provide documentary proof of citizenship. Bush appointed-judge Julie Robinson ruled the documentary proof of citizenship requirement violated federal voter registration requirements spelled out in the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.
Judge Robinson was a military brat who was born at a military base that had since been closed after the end of the Cold War. She sympathized with the plaintiffs in that she didn’t know if she could obtain her birth certificate to register to vote.
Military children and other overseas citizens could be disenfranchised by a documentary proof of citizenship law, and so could others who may be unable to obtain their birth certificates. Setting aside the cost and time required to obtain the documents (which act as a de facto poll tax), the government offices where these documents are stored can be destroyed by fire or natural disasters. Thus, some citizens’ birth certificates simply do not exist.
Arizona and Georgia are different in that these people do not necessarily have to provide documentary proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections (in Arizona, one must show DPOC to vote in state elections). In these states, if a voter registration applicant provides a drivers license number, their citizenship status is obtained from the drivers license database. Both states allowed persons legally in the United States to obtain a drivers license (after all, there are here being productive members of society by legally working jobs). Thus, a drivers license holders’ citizenship status is recorded on these states’ driver license databases.
Those that don’t provide a drivers’ license number because they don’t have one are allowed to register without a citizenship check.
Election officials and outside groups take part in the celebrations at naturalization ceremonies by registering to vote these eager new citizens. The catch in Arizona and Georgia is that naturalized citizens do not have to immediately update their drivers license when they become citizens. So, when election official match recently naturalized citizens’ applications against the drivers license or other government databases, the citizenship information may be stale. Indeed, sensationalistic claims of noncitizen voting in Florida and Texas turned out to be a simple matter of outdated citizenship information. These naturalized citizens can then be additionally burdened by having to present DPOC to election officials again, and again.
Georgia’s system has kept naturalized citizens from voting due to bureaucratic errors, due to no fault by the voters. Election officials frequently ignore the DPOC accompanying a registration application, forcing naturalized citizens to repeatedly present DPOC, and at times with outside groups intervening on their behalf. At one point, Georgia’s election management system automatically overrode citizenship status for naturalized citizens.
What Can Be Done?
Citizens’ rights should not by taken away by administrative procedures prone to failure. So what can be done?
When Trump last called for national photo identification requirements, I agreed with him. We should have that national government issue a free government identification to all persons in the United States — citizens and non-citizens here legally. Those who express great concern about illegal immigration should embrace a way to identify if a person is here illegally.
A bipartisan compromise is that national identification card should serve as voter registration. This is a system many advanced democracies use and is even in use in North Dakota, where there is no voter registration and an eligible voter only needs to provide identification at the polling location.
I am in good company making this proposal, as it was a recommendation made by Jimmy Carter who served on the post-2000 Baker-Carter commission.
I would stress that for a national identification card to work for everyone, it needs to be free and there needs to be a fair process to manage citizens who cannot obtain the required documentary proof of citizenship, because they are poor or because the documents no longer exist.
Another benefit of this proposal is it would do away voter registration. Voter registration is costly to administer and is open to abuse. Little of this abuse actually results in voter fraud — it just provides opportunities for people to scam campaigns and increases workload for overworked election officials.
If a national identification card makes such common sense one may ask, why hasn’t it already happened? There are influential constituencies among libertarians on the right afraid of a government able to track people, immigration rights groups on the left concerned about the consequences on noncitizen communities, and business groups who want cheap illegal immigrant labor. Until a grand compromise can be negotiated that mollifies these interests, likely politicians like Trump and Johnson will continue demagoguery of noncitizen voting without any serious attempt at solving the (nonexistent) problem.
I remember when Republicans were against “papers, please”