Must Voters Have to Prove Citizenship to Register?

The Supreme Court argued Monday over whether states fighting voter fraud and illegal immigration can make people document their U.S. citizenship before allowing them to use a federal voter registration system that was designed to make it easier to vote.

Several justices questioned whether Arizona and other states have the right to force people to document their citizenships when Congress didn’t require it in ordering states to accept and use the “Motor Voter” registration card. But other justices said states should be able to police the citizenship of voters since the federal government only asks people to swear on paper that they’re U.S. citizens.

“This is proof? This is not proof at all,” said Justice Antonin Scalia, who sounded skeptical of the opponents of Arizona’s law.

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The court is deciding the legality of Arizona’s requirement that prospective voters document their U.S. citizenship in order to use a registration form produced under a federal voter registration law. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which doesn’t require that documentation, trumped Arizona’s Proposition 200 passed in 2004.

Arizona appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

This case focuses on voter registration in Arizona, which has tangled frequently with the federal government over immigration issues involving the Mexican border. But it has broader implications because four other states — Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee — have similar requirements, and 12 other states are contemplating similar legislation, officials say.

The federal “Motor Voter” law, enacted in 1993 to expand voter registration, allows would-be voters to fill out a mail-in voter registration card and swear they are citizens under penalty of perjury, but it doesn’t require them to show proof. {snip}

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Opponents of Arizona’s law see it as an attack on vulnerable voter groups such as minorities, immigrants and the elderly. They say they’ve counted more than 31,000 potentially legal voters in Arizona who easily could have registered before Proposition 200 but were blocked initially by the law in the 20 months after it passed in 2004. They say about 20 percent of those thwarted were Latino.

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This is the second voting issue the high court is tackling this session. Last month, several justices voiced deep skepticism about whether a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that has helped millions of minorities exercise their right to vote, especially in areas of the Deep South, was still needed.

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