By Miranda Combs
When the Kentucky General Assembly took up the topic of noncitizen voting in 2024, it wasn’t federal elections at the top of legislators’ minds.
“It’s odd we don’t already have this spelled out in our constitution,” said Sen. Jason Howell — meaning the commonwealth’s constitution. “While this is specifically prohibited at the federal level, it isn’t addressed here in Kentucky.”
Howell was the lead sponsor in the Republican-dominated senate of legislation to put a constitutional amendment on last November’s ballot, to expressly prohibit noncitizens from voting in Kentucky. The text specifies that it applies all the way down to “common school district elections.” Both the legislature and the voters approved the measure by wide margins.
The experience is indicative of how the noncitizen voting issue has developed at the state level: Republicans have been on top of it, but “it” is a matter of perspective. Tres Watson, the founder of Kentucky-based Capitol Reins PR, helped get the 2024 amendment before voters. It addressed a state-specific issue, which supporters framed as a loophole. As for the wider implications of noncitizen voting across the country, though, “There’s not tens of millions of people doing this,” he told Declare. “It’s still a concern, but it’s not the number that people make it out to be.”
Audits from Republicans in states across the country back Watson’s argument. In late October, for example, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson released the findings of her office’s comparison of the state’s voter registration list with data in a federal database, SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which was created to determine eligibility for government benefits and licenses. The Department of Homeland Security has been expanding the use of SAVE this year to make it a tool that election offices can use for voter eligibility checks, such as by submitting the last four digits of a Social Security number. Of more than 18 million Texas voters that Nelson’s team queried, it identified 2,724 potential noncitizens who are registered, or 0.01 percent. The state said that each name will now be investigated further by Texas counties.
Typically, only a fraction of such individuals are referred to law enforcement for evidence of having voted. A week after the Texas news, for example, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced that his office submitted evidence to the U.S. Department of Justice of 1,084 noncitizens alleged to have registered to vote. “This includes 167 noncitizens who appear to have also cast a ballot in a federal election, all of which occurred in the most recent four federal election cycles of 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024,” a statement from the secretary’s office reads. (There have been around 8 million registered voters in Ohio since 2018.)
“Whenever an election administrator has performed an audit, very few noncitizens are registered. Even fewer, if any, vote,” former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson told Declare. “We should always be vigilant to keep it that way. After all, we want Americans to trust our elections.”
In addition to Kentucky, 14 other states have enacted constitutional amendments since 2018 “clarifying” that only American citizens can cast ballots in their states’ elections, as tracked by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Texas was the most recent to do it, as of Election Day two weeks ago. And as policy guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security in late August reminded, “It is unlawful for aliens to vote in federal elections or in most state elections. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act . . . make deportable aliens who falsely claim U.S. citizenship or vote in violation of any federal, state, or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation.”
As NCSL adds, however, the state constitutional amendments “do not address enforcement,” no more than the 1996 federal immigration law does. To Grayson’s point, that part falls to the likes of Nelson, LaRose, and their counterparts, as well as the tools they use to ensure compliance with the law. While contemporary evidence continues to show that noncompliance is rare on a percentage basis, catching it remains a matter of basic law enforcement and trust-building with the public.
“It’s a hard line we have in this country,” said Watson, the Kentucky political consultant who advocated for his state’s amendment. “We have a citizen government, and if you want to vote, that’s the carrot on the stick: to go through the lengthy, difficult process of becoming a citizen. At the end of the rainbow, you get the right to vote.”