'Disenfranchise': Study finds GOP-backed law would strip vote from thousands of citizens

With Republicans pushing a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, new research shows that huge numbers in Ohio and elsewhere lack ready access to such documents.

As with his GOP colleagues in other states, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has failed to show that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the Buckeye State. Even so, he last year started requiring naturalized citizens to show proof of citizenship when challenged at the polls.

Now national Republicans are poised to go much further.

Next week, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Save American Voter Eligibility (or SAVE) Act. Among its provisions is a requirement that people produce proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

As in Ohio, national Republicans haven’t produced any evidence that noncitizen voting is a substantial problem.

There are severe penalties for noncitizen voting, and they seem to be an effective deterrent. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found noncitizen voting occurred at the vanishingly small rate of 0.0001%.

That’s one-fifth the rate of fraud of all types that LaRose found in the 2020 election — 0.0005%. But those infinitesimal numbers haven’t stopped him from conducting massive voter purges, limiting drop boxes, and otherwise making it harder to vote.

If Republicans are successful in creating a national requirement to prove citizenship, much larger numbers of legitimate voters could be affected. The University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement this week produced an analysis using surveys conducted last year and in 2023.

The analysis said that laws “such as the proposed federal SAVE Act or the numerous proof-of-citizenship bills pending in state legislatures, apply not only to new registrants but also to those already registered to vote if their citizenship status is questioned. Voters who move or wish to update their party preference would also need to re-register and be subject to the (proof-of-citizenship) requirement.”

The numbers affected could be huge.

According to the national survey that was conducted in 2023, more than 9% of voting-age citizens — 21.3 million — lacked ready access to documents that would prove their citizenship. Nearly 2% — 2.8 million — lacked any documents at all.

In Ohio, there are about 9.8 million voting age people, of whom 8.2 million are registered.

The number of registered voters would likely take a big dip if the proof-of-citizenship bill passes. Nearly 900,000 voting-age Ohioans lack ready access to citizenship documents and nearly 200,000 lack them altogether — if the numbers found in the national survey apply here.

The researchers conducted two other surveys, in Texas and Georgia, and found that the political consequences might vary according to where you are.

“More Democrats reported lacking access to (citizenship documents) in our national survey; however, our state-level results suggest that the political impact may vary state by state,” the report said. “In our Texas survey, we found more Republicans than Democrats reported not currently having (proof of citizenship) at all or not being able to easily access (citizenship documents.) In our Georgia study, we found roughly even numbers of Democrats and Republicans were impacted.”

However, all surveys found that younger voters were less likely to have ready access to citizenship papers, and the national and Georgia surveys found that independents were less likely to have it. The Texas survey didn’t address independents.

The biggest upshot is that huge numbers would be inconvenienced or disenfranchised to address a problem that the legislation’s supporters cannot show exists. The report noted that in Georgia, an audit found just nine instances of noncitizen voting in a state with 8.2 million registered voters.

“This means that legislation like the SAVE Act that requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote could burden or disenfranchise nearly 85,000 Georgia citizens for every instance of non-citizen voting observed by the Secretary of State,” the report said. “This extraordinarily low rate of accuracy suggests that policy makers and the public may want to explore more accurate policy approaches that prevent these extremely rare cases of non-citizen voting rather than pursuing blanket policies that inaccurately burden or disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters for every instance of non-citizen voting.”