Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there’s one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas.
That’s because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory.
The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.
Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator 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 work out so well.”
Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas.
“The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.”
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Initially, the Kansas requirement’s impacts seemed to fall most heavily on politically unaffiliated and young voters. As of fall 2013, 57% of the 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 over the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three even produced citizenship documents and still didn’t get registered, according to court documents.
“There wasn’t a single one of us that was actually an illegal or had misinterpreted or misrepresented any information or had done anything wrong,” Fish said.
He was supposed to produce his birth certificate when he sought to register in 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver’s license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. A clerk wouldn’t accept the copy Fish had of his birth certificate. He still doesn’t know where to find the original, having been born on an Air Force base in Illinois that closed in the 1990s.
Several of the people joining Fish in the lawsuit were veterans, all born in the U.S., and Fish said he was stunned that they could be prevented from registering.
Liz Azore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans haven’t traveled outside the U.S. and don’t have passports that might act as proof of citizenship, or don’t have ready access to their birth certificates.
She and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make a proof-of-citizenship law run more smoothly today than it did in Kansas a decade ago.
“It’s going to cover a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It’s going to be disenfranchising large swaths of the country.”
See here for the experience of a similar law in Arizona, which is still in operation but had many problems and expenses with its implementation. I doubt either of these situations will dissuade or even give pause to the Texas Legislature as it advances bills to do the same thing in the coming session, but it’s good to know what has happened elsewhere so we can prepare for it. I think it’s likely that Republicans will try to structure the law in such a way that it minimizes harm to their target demographics, but there’s a chance that a combination of paranoia and confidence about their current position of dominance that they won’t worry about it too much. Again, my point here is to help us understand the history so we can be better informed for the fight ahead of us.