Only citizens can vote. Why amend Idaho’s Constitution?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first story in a two-part series from the Idaho Capital Sun about noncitizen voting in Idaho elections. The second story, focused on the few instances of noncitizen voting in Idaho and federal elections, will publish later this week.

BOISE (Idaho Capital Sun) — In November, Idaho voters will consider an amendment to the Idaho Constitution that would ban non-U.S. citizens from voting in Idaho elections.

The Idaho Constitution already requires U.S. citizenship for people to be considered qualified electors.

In Idaho elections, noncitizens have only attempted to vote “handfuls” of times — “not large scale numbers,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane told the Idaho Capital Sun. 

Similar to ballot measures in seven other states, Idaho’s amendment — proposed by the Idaho Legislature this year — comes as a handful of local governments across the U.S. have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, and after years of election security fears fueled in part by false claims about droves of noncitizens voting in federal elections.

Idaho state Rep. Kevin Andrus, R-Lava Hot Springs, says he proposed the amendment to make sure that Idaho law is clear: That noncitizens can’t vote in government elections.

“The main purpose of this legislation is to ensure that no noncitizen will ever vote in a public Idaho election,” he told the Sun in an interview.

But some Democrat state lawmakers worry the amendment could be interpreted to block noncitizens — even immigrants who are legally in the U.S., but aren’t citizens — from voting in private elections, like homeowner’s associations (HOAs) and parent teacher associations (PTAs).

“Our principal concern is that it’s really shoddy drafting, and that on its face, it is not confined to governmental elections,” Idaho House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, told the Sun.

Rubel, an attorney, said she wouldn’t have cared as much if the amendment clearly dealt only with government elections. 

Andrus says private elections wouldn’t be affected by the amendment, and said that wasn’t his intent.

But Rubel also said she was skeptical that the amendment is needed, noting that she couldn’t identify voter fraud instances in Idaho related to noncitizen voting and saying that existing processes could deal with any potential issues that could arise. 

Why states, congressional Republicans seek bans on noncitizen voting

Eight states are considering ballot measures this November to ban noncitizens from voting. Those states include Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin, States Newsroom reported. 

Reuters reports the measures “would mainly tweak state constitutions to say explicitly that only citizens can vote,” but that critics say the change “will have little practical effect, given that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in those states.”

McGrane stressed Idaho election officials have processes to prevent noncitizen voting attempts, which an executive order in July by McGrane and Gov. Brad Little called for Idaho to bolster.

Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University, said assurances about election processes have prompted questions and concerns about whether “a constitutional amendment like this is really necessary.”

“That’s where you come into some debate about, ‘Is this a meaningful change? Is it more just like kind of a symbolic measure?’” Kettler told the Sun. “But I think that’s going to depend a little bit on people’s different perspectives in terms of how impactful this constitutional amendment is and how important it is to explicitly lay it out like this.”

No state lets noncitizens vote in statewide elections, according to a March article by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

According to the organization, municipalities in three states and Washington, D.C., let noncitizens vote in some local elections, such as school board elections in San Francisco, and municipal elections in cities in Maryland and Vermont. 

Idaho is not among those states. But Idaho’s proposed constitutional amendment, Andrus said, would preemptively block any Idaho localities from potentially allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

McGrane told the Sun that no Idaho localities have considered allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Noncitizens voting or registering to vote is illegal under federal law, subject to prison time and deportation.

In September, as the U.S. House attempted to avoid a government shutdown, House Republicans weaved into a stopgap funding measure a provision to bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already banned, States Newsroom reported.

But the U.S. House approved a stopgap funding measure without that bill, which didn’t clear the Senate, States Newsroom reported. 

How Idaho’s proposed constitutional amendment would work

In March, the Idaho House and Senate widely approved House Joint Resolution 5, with only 12 votes against it — all by Democrats — and 91 votes in support.

The resolution says: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be a qualified elector in any election held within the state of Idaho.”

This spring, when Andrus introduced the resolution for debate on the House floor, he told lawmakers that the term “every,” in the Idaho’s Constitution section about citizens being qualified electors, wasn’t an exclusive term.

“The intent (of the proposed amendment) is to apply to city, state, federal elections and certain municipalities,” Andrus told the Sun. 

McGrane, Idaho’s top election official, told the Sun that the amendment’s intent is more narrowly tailored. The origin of the group that pushed for the amendment, he said, was around municipalities that have allowed noncitizens to vote.

“This isn’t like voter fraud or cheating,” McGrane said. “This is saying it intentionally opened up their elections to allow noncitizens to vote in those elections.”

“It’s just something that hasn’t happened historically,” McGrane added. “I think citizenship is one of those things that people just have assumed that only citizens vote. But we do have these local elections in other states — not in Idaho — that have opened up their elections to noncitizens to vote.”

Rubel was critical of the Legislature’s process to approve official arguments, for and against the amendment. She said Republican leadership, who hold a majority of seats on a legislative panel that adopted the language in June, “prevented us” from making the case about potential private elections impact “to the public.”

Republican leadership, in the meeting, noted that the language the committee approved was drafted by staff in the Legislature Services Office, the Legislature’s research arm.

Is Idaho’s constitutional amendment needed?

Research has found relatively few cases of voter fraud caused by noncitizens voting, despite years-long false claims by former president Donald Trump, who has repeated those claims in his 2024 race for president.

“I think anybody with the national perspective right now can see … the potential danger that can come to our elections from noncitizens participating and voting and altering results,” Andrus told the Sun. “So yes, this may not be an issue now in Idaho. But this ensures that it will never be an issue.”

To Rubel, the Democratic leader in the House and an attorney, the amendment is a “crowd pleasing thing” that taps into a “right wing talking point.”

“This is a great way to try to, you know, to pretend to your constituents that you’ve solved a problem and hope that they never figure out that the problem never actually existed. That this is a completely fabricated problem,” she told the Sun.

Andrus said certain people in other states and parts of the U.S. — who he declined to identify, saying he didn’t know who “is really the one behind it” — seem to intend “to bring in illegals and allow them to vote in our elections.”

“And that’s wrong, in my opinion. And absolutely not the intent of the Constitution and the founding fathers,” Andrus told the Sun. “So, I believe that it is important to protect that right for those citizens that have the right. Because if others are allowed to vote that aren’t supposed to, then that diminishes and makes less effective the right of those that actually have it.”