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AP 12:47 JST, December 30, 2024 TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there’s one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas. That’s because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory. The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018. Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it. “Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.” Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas. “The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.” Kansas’ experience appeared to receive little if any attention outside the state as Republicans elsewhere pursued proof-of-citizenship requirements this year. Arizona enacted a requirement this year, applying it to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or president. The Republican-led U.S. House passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP won control of the Senate in November. In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state revised the form that poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require those not born in the U.S. to show naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge declined to block the practice days before the election. Also, sizable majorities of voters in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and the presidential swing states of North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to amend their state constitutions’ provisions on voting even though the changes were only symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all U.S. citizens could vote now say that only U.S. citizens can vote — a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible. To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught. “There is nothing unconstitutional about ensuring that only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, of Texas, the leading sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email statement to The Associated Press. After Kansas residents challenged their state’s law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That’s an issue Congress could resolve. The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn’t justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year. In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.” Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved. “The technological challenge of how quickly can you verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.” The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kansas case in 2020. But in August, it split 5-4 in allowing Arizona to continue enforcing its law for voting in state and local elections while a legal challenge goes forward. Seeing the possibility of a different Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should pursue proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was the Kansas attorney general when his state’s law was challenged. “If the same matter arose now and was litigated, the facts would be different,” he said in an interview. But voting rights advocates dismiss the idea that a legal challenge would turn out differently. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court fight. “We know the people we can call,” Johnson said. “We know that we’ve got the expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted “a flurry — a landslide — of litigation against this.” Initially, the Kansas requirement’s impacts seemed to fall most heavily on politically unaffiliated and young voters. As of fall 2013, 57% of the voters blocked from registering were unaffiliated and 40% were under 30. But Fish was in his mid-30s, and six of the nine residents who sued over the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three even produced citizenship documents and still didn’t get registered, according to court documents. “There wasn’t a single one of us that was actually an illegal or had misinterpreted or misrepresented any information or had done anything wrong,” Fish said. He was supposed to produce his birth certificate when he sought to register in 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver’s license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. A clerk wouldn’t accept the copy Fish had of his birth certificate. He still doesn’t know where to find the original, having been born on an Air Force base in Illinois that closed in the 1990s. Several of the people joining Fish in the lawsuit were veterans, all born in the U.S., and Fish said he was stunned that they could be prevented from registering. Liz Azore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans haven’t traveled outside the U.S. and don’t have passports that might act as proof of citizenship, or don’t have ready access to their birth certificates. She and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make a proof-of-citizenship law run more smoothly today than it did in Kansas a decade ago. “It’s going to cover a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It’s going to be disenfranchising large swaths of the country.”
OTTAWA—The RCMP says it has “contingency plans” to deploy more Mounties to the Canada-U.S. border but needs answers from the Liberal government about how much more it intends to spend on additional drones, helicopters or other technology to surveil it. The Trudeau government says it has not yet “finalized” those decisions as it fended off Opposition criticism it is too slow to act to counter incoming president Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian products on his first day in office. RCMP Comm. Michael Duheme told reporters there are two “parallel” tracks to the Mounties’ plans — one contingent on how many illegal immigrants might be “removed” from America by an incoming Trump administration and drive a northward surge into Canada, and the other contingent on how much new technology the Liberal government will fund. Speaking after he testified at a public safety committee, the top Mountie said he is not opposed to expanding the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) mandate into the RCMP’s jurisdiction over territory between official border points of entry, as the border guards’ union has called for. “I think we have to do what’s right, to secure the borders. So if that’s increasing authorities to CBSA, I mean, that’s a discussion I would have” with the head of the CBSA and the government, Duheme said. He said it would be a “longer-term” move, “but I think we have to explore different ways of doing things.” Meanwhile, Duheme said the RCMP needs the “nimbleness” to reassign resources where needed, and he will deploy cadets from the RCMP training academy in Regina — as the national police force did in 2014 to provide additional security following the Parliament Hill attacks. “What you saw in Roxham Road (where migrants crossed illegally near Lacolle, Que.) may not repeat itself,” said Duheme. “It might come somewhere else, right? So that’s one thing, but on the parallel track is the planning a way forward with the asks that we’ve put in ... and the resources required to do it.” Defence Minister Bill Blair told the Star Monday night that Canadian Forces may be able to supply surveillance drones and other technological aids, but that soldiers would not be deployed to the border. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Chrystia Freeland — who co-chairs the Canada-U.S. cabinet committee — met with Opposition leaders Tuesday to brief them on the government’s work to address the Trump threat, and on Trudeau’s and LeBlanc’s trip to Trump’s resort at Mar-a-Lago on Friday. Trudeau and LeBlanc discussed trade and the border over dinner with the president-elect at his Freeland later said she was not upset at not being included on the trip, and said “it was the right choice. The meeting was principally about the border. That is what was very clear from the conversation that the prime minister had with the president ahead of time.” Freeland called for a “Team Canada” approach to dealing with Trump, repeating a message she delivered to premiers last week, that it is “important for us to take care not to negotiate against ourselves.” However, when Trudeau’s Commons opponents emerged, they did not offer full-throated support for his efforts. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would take a “Canada first” approach,” stress the harm that tariffs would have on Canada and the U.S. and he put the blame for Canada’s problems with Trump squarely at Trudeau’s feet, a line of attack he continued in the Commons. “Whether one thinks that President Trump’s tariff threats are a negotiating tactic or a real plan, what we do know is what we can control. The prime minister has lost control of everything” including borders and control of immigration, he said. Poilievre said Trudeau is an unpopular leader in an “unbearably weak position” to counter Trump, and demanded an election to replace him. Trudeau in the Commons replied that Poilievre should guard against repeating “erroneous narratives that the Americans are putting forward,” saying amplifying “these ‘broken’ narratives is simply not responsible leadership.” New Democrat Jagmeet Singh said he told Trudeau in the meeting that he pressed Trudeau to hire “at a minimum” 1,100 more border guards. That’s a lot fewer than the union says are needed. Erin O’Gorman, head of the border agency, told MPs the CBSA currently has 16,300 full time employees, 8,500 of whom are front-line employees, compared to 13,700 it had in 2014 when the Conservatives were in power. However, the Customs and Immigration Union says only 6,500 are considered front-line employees, including those who work not just at land border points of entry, but at airports and who enforce customs laws at postal facilities. Union head Mark Weber, in an interview with the Star, said the union has called for an additional 2,000-3,000 front-line officers, and was encouraged by LeBlanc’s testimony that showed an “openness” to expanding the role played by border guards to include patrolling in between official points of entry with the RCMP. Weber reiterated in a letter to LeBlanc Monday the union’s request to the Liberal government to review a 1932 cabinet order that directed the RCMP to cover border areas between official ports of entry while leaving the official points of entry to border officers. ” LeBlanc told MPs Tuesday that the government is “interested in taking immediate steps that will reassure Canadians and the Americans that the border remains secure and the integrity of the border is protected ... We haven’t made any decisions in that regard. But are open to considering that as well.” Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said that the Liberals did not offer details, but seem to have a plan in the works. “We’ll see what it contains,” he said. “I don’t want to fight too much publicly about an issue which is very important for everybody, both in Canada and Quebec and Americans are looking at us now. So I will give some time to Mr. LeBlanc to provide us with the details of the plan.” Former Conservative leader Rona Ambrose in a CBC interview Tuesday said, “look, I think it’s easy to say everyone should be on Team Canada, but that doesn’t mean Team Trudeau.” Ambrose, who previously sat on Trudeau’s NAFTA advisory council, said Poilievre and Singh would all argue they are on Team Canada, but that they also have legitimate criticisms to make of how Trudeau has not positioned Canada’s economy to withstand Trump’s threats and the moves he will make to draw investors and capital away from Canada to the United States.
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