Speaker Johnson introduces bill to prohibit noncitizens from voting

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled his long-awaited bill to bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, a measure he first teased alongside former President Donald Trump nearly a month ago.

Johnson, along with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and other GOP lawmakers, introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act on Wednesday, seeking to amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require individuals to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote. The bill comes after the speaker joined Trump in Mar-a-Lago last month to voice concerns about election integrity ahead of the November election.

“There is currently an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system,” Johnson said. “And that is the threat of noncitizens and illegal aliens voting in our elections.”

Johnson expressed concerns that “potentially hundreds of thousands of votes” will be cast in November by illegal immigrants, claiming they do not need to prove their citizenship before casting a ballot under current law.

Federal law requires voter registration forms to compel voters to swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens of the United States. Additionally, individuals must provide proof of a driver’s license or Social Security number in order for election officials to verify their identity in U.S. databases.

However, some Republicans have lamented the law does not go far enough to require additional scrutiny on whether individuals are eligible to vote.

”We’re here for the simple proposition supported by the vast majority of the American people that only citizens of the United States should vote, that we should have documentary proof, that we should have a system to guarantee that only citizens of the United States vote in federal elections, where we have the clear authority under the Constitution, the United States and our laws as Congress to set the terms of those elections,” Roy said.

The proposal has garnered some criticism from opponents who have argued it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, decrying the bill as redundant.

Although there have been instances of noncitizens voting in federal elections, the cases are typically few and far between. A fraud database housed by the conservative Heritage Foundation found only 100 cases of noncitizens voting between 2002 and 2022 among a sample of more than 1 billion ballots.

Even if those ballots were not detected, such small numbers would do little to sway a presidential election one way or the other. However, Republicans argue the threat is becoming more prominent amid the record-high surge of illegal immigration at the southern border under the Biden administration.

“Due to the wide-open border that the Biden administration has refused to close — in fact, that they engineered to open — we now have so many noncitizens in the country that if only one out of 100 of those voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes,” Johnson said.

This is not the first time Republicans have targeted election laws to prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections. GOP lawmakers have repeatedly challenged local jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, particularly in Washington, D.C.

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“It is also true that a growing number of localities are blurring the lines for noncitizens by allowing them to vote in municipal local elections,” Johnson said. “Democrats have expressed a desire to turn noncitizens into voters. That’s what this open border has been all about.”

It’s not yet clear when the legislation will be brought to the House floor for a vote. However, it’s likely to face pushback in the Democratic-led Senate, which could provide Republicans with fodder to attack their opponents on the campaign trail heading into November.