Noncitizens Can’t Vote — 8 States Just Passed Amendments Forbidding It Anyway

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

This November, a few months after being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, Eloy Tupayachi Salas voted in a U.S. presidential election for the first time.

As a North Carolina resident, he also voted on a constitutional amendment to change the language on voter eligibility from “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” to “only a citizen” who meets age and eligibility requirements. The ballot didn’t show what the text currently was, only the proposed change.

Salas, who is the digital strategy and content manager of non-partisan Latino organization El Pueblo, has campaigned against the measure since June. He sees the proposal as more than just a restatement of the status quo.

“It has created a lot of confusion; there are [naturalized] people who aren’t sure if they can vote and people who aren’t Latinos who are listening to this narrative and believe that a lot of noncitizen immigrants are voting,” he told Truthout.

In addition to the amendment on the ballot in North Carolina, similar constitutional amendments were voted on in Wisconsin, South Carolina, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Salas and other advocates campaigned against these measures, arguing that they created confusion around who can vote, fueled conspiracies that noncitizens are voting en masse, and served as a mechanism to activate conservative turnout.

The amendments passed in every state where they were included on the ballot, with provisional results showing percentages ranging from 62 to 86 percent. Eight states — Colorado, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana — approved similar measures in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections.

Right-wing fearmongering about noncitizen voting has featured prominently in this presidential campaign. At the September 10 election debate, Donald Trump said that “our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” On Election Day, he posted on Truth Social: “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.… Law Enforcement coming!!!”

A Form of Intimidation

Noncitizen voting has a storied history in the U.S. across 40 states from 1776 to 1926. In 1996, Congress made noncitizen voting at the federal level punishable by imprisonment and fines. Today, only 19 jurisdictions across California, Vermont, Maryland and Washington, D.C. allow noncitizen voting in local elections. In this year’s election, the city of Santa Ana, near Los Angeles, introduced a ballot measure that would allow noncitizens to vote locally, but the measure lost by 60 percent.

Proponents of the constitutional amendments also point at the few jurisdictions that allow noncitizen voting in local elections as a sign that states need to implement extra guardrails against cities expanding voting rights. But there hasn’t been a campaign to expand noncitizen voting rights in any of the states that have passed amendments changing the language around noncitizen voting, according to the Immigrant Voting Rights website created by San Francisco State University professor Ron Hayduk.

In North Carolina, the state could rapidly shut down any local attempts to expand noncitizen voting rights, Voting Rights Counsel at Southern Coalition for Social Justice Chris Shenton told Truthout.

“The general assembly has been very quick to preempt any city that has passed a policy it disagreed with. They preempted minimum wage laws. They preempted rent-control laws,” Shenton said. “They’re not shy about it. They will override cities and counties that do that and the North Carolina constitution gives them a significant amount of ability to do that.”

Besides these limited initiatives, there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. The Brennan Center for Justice studied noncitizen voting in 2016 for 42 jurisdictions. Out of 23.5 million votes, there were only 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting, though these incidents were never proven. That is 0.0001 percent of the votes. Even data from the far right think tank the Heritage Foundation documents only 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s.

Instead, there is a push to disenfranchise naturalized voters by purging them from voting records.

In Iowa, where the amendment to change language on voter eligibility passed by 77 percent, Secretary of State Paul Pate challenged over 2,000 registered voters that he alleged were not citizens, saying they would have to cast provisional ballots. The ACLU of Iowa and four naturalized citizens sued, saying Pate was using Department of Transportation data that is in some cases years old. A day before the elections, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher, a Joe Biden appointee, decided not to block Pate’s directive, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Virginia to purge 1,600 voters and saying that 12 percent of names on Pate’s list were not U.S. citizens.

Communications Manager at Democracy North Carolina Joselle Torres said that signs in Spanish popped up in polling stations at North Carolina. The signs said “WARNING: if you are not a citizen of the United States of America, you cannot vote in elections. It is illegal! It is a crime. 18 U.S. Code § 611. You could be deported. Don’t do it!”

Torres said Democracy North Carolina brought it up to the state board of elections, who removed some but not all the signs.

“That is a form of intimidation,” Torres told Truthout.

Lee County Republican Party Chair James “Jim” Womack founded a group called Election Integrity Team. In a virtual meeting on October 21, he told 1,800 volunteers to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as suspicious.

“We’re Here. We’re Not Leaving.”

Most of the recently passed amendments to change language around voter eligibility replaced the phrase “every citizen” with the phrase “only citizens.” North Carolina’s decision to strike down the word “naturalized” and the phrase “every person born in the United States” has made Shenton and Torres fear that the amendment could pave the way to revoking voting rights for naturalized citizens and Americans born to foreign parents.

“If there ever came a moment where birthright citizenship in the United States was no longer considered federal law, that language in the Constitution would allow North Carolina politicians to exclude anyone who didn’t meet whatever the new definition of citizenship was,” Shenton told Truthout.

Edith Morales, a noncitizen who has lived in North Carolina for 18 years, has been an advocate with El Pueblo for one year.

Morales first got involved with the campaign to spread voting information. “A lot of people didn’t know about this question,” she told Truthout. “We give them the information and they think it’s a normal question.”

Then, she realized she was strongly opposed to the amendment — on behalf of both herself, in case she one day becomes a citizen, and her 10-year-old son, who was born in the U.S.

When she pointed at how the word “naturalize” would disappear from the constitution, she says people were in disbelief, asking, “How can they do that to us?”

Morales was shocked at the result, which she attributed to the campaign not reaching enough people.

“We’re here. We’re not leaving,” she told Truthout. “And if they kick us out, we’ll come back.”

On the morning following the election, Tupayachi Salas said El Pueblo would keep fighting to defend the right of all citizens, whether by birth or naturalization, to vote without fear.

“We should be creating ways to encourage the participation of all citizens, no matter where they come from, in the elections,” he told Truthout. “We should not be creating these barriers. All they do is discourage people from going out to vote and create hatred.”