What’s the matter with Kansas? If Secretary of State Kris Kobach and House Republicans have their way, it will be a hard place to register to vote this year.
Last year, the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature approved a bill to impose proof-of-citizenship requirements on all state residents who register to vote. The law is scheduled to take effect in January 2013, a timeline the Senate insisted upon in order to give the Division of Vehicles time to upgrade its computer systems to get ready for the change. But today the legislature is considering a new bill, rushed through by Republicans in the House, that would force the implementation of the law on June 15—in time for the 2012 election.
Opponents of the Kansas law—like Rep. Ann Mah, the ranking Democrat on the House Elections Committee—caution that the proof-of-citizenship law will disenfranchise voters, and that rushing its implementation is a huge mistake. “We had been trying to tell folks that the DMV wouldn’t be ready, but that was just the tip of the iceberg,” Mah told the Topeka Capitol-Journal. “Implementing this law would shut down grassroots voter registration as well. It would hamstring registration in malls, churches, stores, door-to-door and anywhere outside of the county election office. Tens of thousands of Kansans would not get to register to vote this year.”
Voting rights groups agree that proof-of-citizenship requirements unfairly disenfranchise eligible Americans. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as 7 percent of all Americans do not have ready access to passports, birth certificates, or naturalization papers —all documents that are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Low-income Americans, ethnic minorities, the elderly, and new voters are less likely to have the necessary documentation, and thus are at greatest risk of disenfranchisement.
As Rep. Mah points out, proof-of-citizenship requirements also have the potential to disable community voter registration drives. Very few residents walk around carrying copies of their passports or birth certificates to give to a voter registration volunteer when completing an application.
Until 2011, Arizona and Georgia were the only states to adopt restrictive citizenship policies. In the first year of implementation, Arizona’s law resulted in tens of thousands of registration applications being wrongly rejected due to documentation problems. The law was struck down by a three-judge panel in 2010 for violating the National Voter Registration Act, but is currently undergoing an en banc review by the full Ninth Circuit Court.
Despite these problems, there is currently a widespread movement to implement similar laws across the country. Alabama and Tennessee joined Kansas last year in passing proof-of-citizenship laws. This year, California is considering a similar law, as are Massachusetts, Michigan, and South Carolina. Another proof-of-citizenship rule was introduced in New Hampshire but did not move.
So what’s driving this movement? Despite what their proponents claim, there is no epidemic of fraudulent voting that justifies these potentially disastrous measures. Numerous studies have shown that in-person voter fraud is extremely rare. Kobach—the author of Arizona’s controversial anti-immigration law, and a driving force in the national movement for proof-of-citizenship requirements—has claimed that there have been 221 voter fraud cases in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true it would be a statistically tiny number, but the fact is that Kobach has not been able to point to a single conviction or arrest to back up this claim.
And there has been no proof of widespread voting by illegal immigrants, in Kansas or elsewhere. Voting by a non-citizen carries the risk of jail time, tens of thousands of dollars in fines, and deportation: all dangers that few non-citizens would be willing to risk for the sake of casting a single vote. The logic simply doesn’t make sense, making proof-of-citizenship requirements a solution in search of a problem.
So what’s driving these laws? “Proof-of-citizenship laws are not about preventing so-called ‘voter-fraud,’ but about discouraging voting and shutting down community registration drives,” says Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote. “With an estimated 51 million eligible Americans still not registered to vote—a group disproportionately composed of low-income and minority citizens—we need to be making it easier for people to register, not putting up new bureaucratic hurdles. Our democracy works best when everyone participates.”