Noncitizen voting is back in the news, as a federal court held that Arizona may not require proof of citizenship from people trying to register to vote in presidential elections. This is just the latest in a decades-long saga of courts blocking state efforts to prevent noncitizens from registering and voting.
The legal back-and-forth can be difficult to follow, but it is quite clear what is going on here from a 30,000-foot perspective. (RELATED: BETSY McCAUGHEY: Is Laken Riley’s Life Worth Less Than George Floyd’s?)
Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want noncitizens to participate in elections. Responding to that quite reasonable desire of their constituents, politicians enact laws to prevent that from happening. That sounds a lot like democracy.
But then something strange happens. Lawyers show up in court talking about how these democratically enacted laws are, in reality, threats to democracy. And then they make an even more bizarre argument. They say that the laws are not necessary because it would be entirely irrational for a noncitizen to even try to register to vote, let alone actually vote.
After all, there are big penalties for doing so, including jail time and deportation.
Yet, noncitizens do so anyway. In Georgia, over 1,600 noncitizens tried to register to vote, only being thwarted due to the state’s citizenship review requirement. This comes as an election integrity group, the Public Interest Law Foundation, showed that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote across 13 sanctuary cities.
If the penalties are as severe as those lawyers say, how does this make any sense?
Well, when prominent Democrats tell people that they must “vote like their lives depend on it” because “they do,” or that their options are to “vote or die,” or even that Republicans are going to throw immigrants into concentration camps, people may just listen to them. Especially when Democrats are allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, putting noncitizens in charge of running elections, and calling the longstanding American tradition of only citizens having a say in how their country is run “taxation without representation.”
What else are noncitizens supposed to think?
Thankfully, this isn’t the end of the story.
Although Democrat lawyers keep trying to take them to court, state and federal Republicans have been pushing legislation to protect our elections and ensure that only citizens have a say in how our republic is run. And once those laws are passed, organizations like RITE are stepping in to fend off the legal attacks from leftist lawyers while also making sure state secretaries of state are enforcing the laws as the legislature wrote them. (RELATED: REP. ANDY BIGGS: Biden’s Spin On The Border Crisis Is A Real Head-Scratcher)
This is the playbook for how we protect our elections.
Democrats are going to continue to fearmonger — that’s just what they do. They’re going to push open border policies, tear down border fencing, and tell everyone that their options are to vote for them or die. This means it’s incumbent upon us to push back — to fight for common sense election integrity measures such as citizenship verification and voter ID, and to meet these Democrats in court when they argue these democratically-enacted rules threaten democracy.
It really is the least we can do to restore trust in our elections and ensure that only citizens have a say in how our country is run.
Riley Compton is a Junior Counsel for Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) and a Daily Caller Election Law Contributor.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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