House Passes GOP Bill Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Vote

The House on Wednesday passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, a proposal Republicans have prioritized as an election-year talking point even as research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare.

The legislation, approved largely along partisan lines but with five Democrats voting in favor, is unlikely to advance through the Democratic-led Senate. The Biden administration also says it’s strongly opposed because there already are safeguards to enforce the law against noncitizen voting.

Still, the House vote will give Republicans an opportunity to bring attention to two of their central issues this year — border and election security.

It also provides an opportunity to fuel former President Donald Trump’s claims that Democrats have encouraged the surge of migrants so they can register them to vote, which would be illegal. Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, nor is it allowed for any statewide elections.

Research and audits in several states show there have been incidences of noncitizens who successfully registered to vote and cast ballots, but it happens rarely and is typically by mistake. States have mechanisms to check for it, although there isn’t one standard protocol they all follow.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, a key backer of the bill, said in a news conference earlier this week that the Democratic opposition means many Democrats “want illegals to participate in our federal elections; they want them to vote.”

During a speech Wednesday, he called the vote a “generation-defining moment.”

“If just a small percentage, a fraction of a fraction of all those illegals that Joe Biden has brought in here to vote, if they do vote, it wouldn’t just change one race,” he said. “It might potentially change all of our races.”

On his Truth Social platform this week, Trump suggested that Democrats are pushing to give noncitizen migrants the right to vote and urged Republicans to pass the legislation — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — or “go home and cry yourself to sleep.”

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During the Wednesday floor debate, Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, expressed concern that the bill would disenfranchise various American citizens.

He mentioned military members stationed abroad who couldn’t show documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office, as well as married women whose names have changed, Native Americans whose tribal IDs don’t show their place of birth and natural disaster survivors who have lost their personal documents.

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If passed, the bill would require noncitizens to be removed from state voter rolls and require new applicants to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. It also would require states to establish a process for applicants who can’t show proof to provide other evidence beyond their attestation of citizenship, though it’s unclear what that evidence could include.

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