Kentucky’s Amendment 1, which bans noncitizens from voting in elections, passes easily
Voters in Kentucky overwhelmingly approved a measure Tuesday barring non-citizens from voting — though its passage will not change much for the state.
Kentucky already limits voting to U.S. citizens.
“To me, the takeaway here is that the amendment was not going to make a difference either way. It’s not going to change anything about the way we run elections,” said Joshua Douglas, who teaches elections law at the University of Kentucky.
According to preliminary, unofficial results, with 67% of votes counted, the Associated Press declared that the measure, Constitutional Amendment 1, passed by a wide margin of 61.5% to 38.5%.
The language of Amendment 1 expressly declares: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state.”
However, voting in Kentucky already is limited by state law to a “citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen years.” Federal law likewise prohibits non-citizens from trying to vote in presidential and congressional races, at risk of fines and up to a year in prison.
Testifying to state lawmakers in June, Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said elections officials clearly understand these laws to mean that only U.S. citizens can cast a ballot.
“To that end, I have good news,” Adams said. “During my tenure in office, I have seen no evidence that non-citizens have voted or attempted to vote in our elections.”
So what problem was Amendment 1 meant to fix?
Nationally, a study by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing nearly 24 million votes cast in the 2016 general election concluded that only about 30 votes could be identified as having been cast by noncitizens.
Feeding false narratives
Critics say Amendment 1 was a cynical ploy to use anti-immigrant sentiment in Kentucky to draw conservative voters to the polls for other races, such as Amendment 2, the question of whether public K-12 school funds should be allowed to flow to private and religious schools. (If so, it was unsuccessful. Amendment 2 failed on Tuesday.)
Amendment 1 fed into false narratives about elections being rigged, eroding faith in the democratic process, and undocumented immigrants pouring uncontrollably across the borders, said state Rep. Nima Kulkarni, D-Louisville.
Apart from being a lawmaker, Kulkarni is executive director of the nonprofit New Americans Initiative, which works to get naturalized citizens engaged in their communities, including registering them to vote.
Amendment 1 unfairly targeted people who might look or speak differently than a native-born Kentuckian or whose names appear unusual to some, Kulkarni said.
“We’ve heard from our elections officials that non-citizen voting is not a problem. We have voter ID requirements already,” she said.
“But when you raise fears about this, you might end up in situations where individuals at the polls say, ‘It’s up to me to verify that this person here really is a U.S. citizen,’ and then what? I was naturalized when I was 14 years old, but I don’t carry my naturalization papers around with me. Should I not be allowed to vote?” she asked.
‘Seeking to be proactive’
Sponsors called Amendment 1 a preventative measure.
Future Kentucky lawmakers, they said, might change state law to let non-citizens vote in state elections. Or local governments — cities, counties, school boards, special districts — might try to allow non-citizens to vote in their own local elections, arguing that state law doesn’t cover those races.
That has happened with a handful of local governments in California, Maryland and Vermont. San Francisco, for example, amended its charter in 2016 to allow non-citizen parents or guardians of students to vote in local school elections, arguing that everyone with children in the schools has a stake in how the schools are run.
That shouldn’t ever be allowed to happen here, Kentucky lawmakers said.
“We’re seeking to be proactive with this amendment,” state Rep. Michael Meredith, R-Oakland, said during last winter’s legislative session, when the language behind Amendment 1 was passed. “We seek to get ahead of this before this does happen, potentially, in the commonwealth of Kentucky.”
Joining a national trend
Despite Meredith’s concerns, Kentucky does not grant local governments the same degree of “home rule,” or authority to self-govern, that states like California, Maryland and Vermont do, countered Douglas, the UK law professor.
A locality in Kentucky that wanted to change its election rules likely would need the General Assembly to approve the change, and it’s hard to imagine the current Republican super-majorities awarding non-citizens the right to vote in any kind of election, Douglas said.
The practical effect of Amendment 1 would be to tie the hands of a future legislature that might view things more liberally, he said.
With Amendment 1, Kentucky joined a national trend of states wanting to make U.S. citizenship an explicit and permanent requirement for voting in every race. Seven other states — Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — proposed the same kind of amendment on this year’s ballot.
Since 2020, six states — Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio — have amended their constitutions to limit the ballot to U.S. citizens, he said. Arizona’s constitution already carried that requirement.
