A coalition of anti-immigrant and election-denying activists called Only Citizens Vote Coalition has joined forces with the powerful rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) to draft a model bill requiring citizenship for voting in “all public elections”.
Non-US citizens are already forbidden from voting in federal elections, and could face felony charges and even deportation if they attempt to do so. All evidence suggests non-citizens rarely attempt to cast a ballot illegally. But as the 2024 general presidential election approaches, a group of Donald Trump allies – among them, Only Citizens Vote Coalition – have joined together to elevate fears of non-citizens voting.
The claim, peddled by figures on the right from the Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, to the tech billionaire Elon Musk, stokes doubts about the US electoral process that Trump raised after losing the 2020 election.
It also provides a justification for draft legislation such as Alec has recently put forward, which voting rights advocates warn could make it harder to cast a ballot and result in large-scale purges that could remove eligible voters.
“[They’re] just creating extra barriers with the real game of doing two things, in my opinion: one, creating doubt in the system as a whole, and; second, disenfranchising people,” said TR Edwards, a staff attorney with the elections-focused Wisconsin group, Law Forward.
It’s not clear how certain aspects of the policy would affect voters. For example, the text of the model bill says that the state head of elections is required to confirm the citizenship status of voters by comparing voter rolls “with the citizenship data available from the state’s department of motor vehicles and the Help America Vote Verification (Havv) information system maintained by the Social Security Administration”. Anyone registering to vote through the DMV must already attest to being a US citizen, under penalty of perjury.
But Jon Greenbaum, a voting rights attorney who has argued against proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting in Georgia, said the policy – if adopted – would probably require a higher standard of proof.
“I don’t think Alec is proposing that the attestation that people make on their application is going to be sufficient – they want a document,” said Greenbaum, noting that many eligible voters simply don’t have documentary proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, on hand. “It would end up disenfranchizing people,” he added.
The push to bring Alec’s model bill to the states appears to have originated with Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group that Cleta Mitchell, who assisted Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, helped found. Members of Only Citizens Vote Coalition presented at Alec’s annual meeting at the end of July.
According to an Only Citizens Vote Coalition newsletter, Mitchell; Chris Chmielenski, the head of the anti-immigration group Immigration Accountability Project; and Ken Cuccinelli, whose Election Transparency Initiative has advanced restrictive voting laws in the states, were among the coalition’s key voices at Alec. Chairing the taskforce that adopted the model policy, Rolling Stone has reported, was a powerful pharmaceutical industry lobbyist – illustrating the growing alliance between election deniers and corporate interests.
Wisconsin state representative Scott Krug – who has often pushed back against election denial in the state legislature – also spoke there on behalf of Only Citizens Vote Coalition. “Our speakers,” the newsletter reads, “were a BIG attraction at ALEC as they packed the room with over 150 legislators and other interested citizens – teaching the OCVC mission and the details on how to get the mission done!”
During Only Citizens Vote Coalition’s weekly calls with local activists around the country, the group’s leaders have claimed that US elections are vulnerable to mass fraud – an idea that has long fueled the passage of restrictive voting measures. According to the group’s official notes from a 15 August meeting, which the Guardian reviewed, Kerri Toloczko, a leader in Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, told the group that she had evidence to suggest that 6% of non-US citizens cast ballots in the 2016 election.
The idea that non-US citizens participated en masse in the 2016 election echoes Trump’s long-debunked claims that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton, costing him the popular vote. Toloczko did not respond to a request for comment.
Only Citizens Vote Coalition has introduced similar legislation at the federal level in the form of a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship before casting a ballot – a high bar to clear and one that many US citizens would probably struggle to meet, according to a 2024 analysis by the Brennan Center.
“My grandparents, for instance, might be a great example,” said Edwards, of Law Forward. “Both of them were born in the Jim Crow south. My grandmother did not have a birth certificate until she was like 30.”
The Save Act cleared the House but will almost certainly not be approved in the Senate, which is controlled by a slim Democratic majority. Joe Biden has indicated that he would veto the legislation if it made it to his desk, writing in a statement that the bill would do “nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls”.
The Only Citizens Vote policy goes further than the Save Act, specifying that it would ban non-US citizens from voting in “any and all public elections on any and all matters”. The bill would prevent local governments from adopting rules that certain cities – including Oakland; Takoma Park, Maryland; and Burlington, Vermont – have passed allowing residents without full citizenship to participate in local elections.
