Democrats divided over proposal to prohibit noncitizens from voting in DC elections

The House passed a bill on Thursday to ban noncitizens from voting in local elections in Washington, D.C., after several dozen Democrats broke with party leadership to support the measure.

Lawmakers voted 262-143 to approve the legislation, which would overturn a local law giving noncitizens access to elections including those for members of the city council. Fifty-two Democrats ultimately joined all Republicans despite efforts from Democratic leadership to quash the proposal.

The vote comes one year after House Republicans made a separate attempt to ban noncitizens from voting in the district, with the measure passing by a similar margin. More Democrats voted for the bill this time around, as only 42 voted in favor last year when it passed in a 260-162 vote.

However, the legislation never made it to the floor in the Democratic-led Senate and is not expected to this time, either.

House Republicans decided to bring the legislation back for another vote as they look to make election integrity a focal point of their 2024 platform.

“Extreme House Democrats are already on the record supporting giving illegal migrants the right to vote and any change in their position is just disgusting election-year politics,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Will Reinert said in a statement. “We will be watching and holding these frauds accountable if they try to pull the wool over voters’ eyes.”

The bill is one of several pieces of legislation GOP leadership is using to target election laws, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also working to advance a bill that would ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Republican leaders have sought to tie it to the surge of illegal immigration at the border, using it as a leading attack against the Biden administration.

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“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 last week.

Democrats have rejected the tactic as embracing former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud. The conservative Heritage Foundation has found about two dozen instances of noncitizen voting over the last two decades, though there is no evidence of widespread cases.