Kentucky’s Amendment One: What It Means for Noncitizen Voting Rights
November 1, 2024
By: Olivia Rovin
This year on election day in Kentucky, the ballot will have two constitutional amendments. The one causing the most controversy is the proposed Amendment One which states as follows:
Every citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen years who has resided in the state one year, and in the county six months, and the precinct in which he or she offers to vote sixty days next preceding the election, shall be a voter in said precinct and not elsewhere. No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state. The following persons also shall not have the right to vote:
- Persons convicted in any court of competent jurisdiction of treason, or felony, or bribery in an election, or of such high misdemeanor as the General Assembly may declare shall operate as an exclusion from the right of suffrage, but persons hereby excluded may be restored to their civil rights by executive pardon.
- Persons who, at the time of the election, are in confinement under the judgment of a court for some penal offense.
- Idiots and insane persons.
Noncitizens cannot vote or register to vote in any state or local elections in Kentucky. There is currently no evidence that noncitizens are voting in Kentucky elections according to Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Michael Adams. Despite this, supporters of Amendment One are worried about noncitizens being allowed to vote in local elections. Representative Michael Meredith, who sponsored the Amendment in the Kentucky House, said “We don’t want illegal immigrants or non-citizens voting in Kentucky elections, like they have in some other states. Not in state elections, not in federal elections, but they’re doing it at the local level. Voting in local elections. They’re voting in school board elections.” When Meredith refers to some other states, he means states like California. In San Francisco, local law allows non-citizens to vote in local Board of Education elections. However, non-citizens cannot vote in other local, state, or federal elections in San Francisco. This Amendment is a backlash to this concept.
While this Amendment has received “overwhelming GOP support,” some Kentucky Democrats do not seem to think this language is necessary. “I, too, would not want someone who’s not a citizen of the United States to be voting in our elections,” said Sen. David Yates when the bill was up for a vote in the Senate. “But that’s not happening. And I don’t think there’s any fear of it happening since it’s already in Kentucky’s constitution.” Supporters of the Amendment think it will close the “loophole” in the constitution which does not explicitly forbid non-citizens from voting.
In 1996, Congress passed a law that prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections; however, this law does not address local or state elections. As of December 2023, there are sixteen municipalities across America that allow noncitizens to vote. Eleven of these municipalities are in Maryland, three are in Vermont, and two are in California.
Noncitizen voting is not an actual problem that affects state or federal elections. The conservative think tank, Heritage Fund’s, very own database proves that noncitizen voting is not a problem. There have only been 68 documented cases (out of 1,546 “proven instances of voter fraud”) of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Of those 68 people, only ten lived in the country illegally. For one, undocumented people are not likely to risk their lives in the United States to cast a vote that is already illegal. It is a “deportable offense” for noncitizens to even register to vote. Registering also creates a government record which is not something that an undocumented person would like to do.
The idea that noncitizens are voting has become especially prominent as a political tool used by former President Trump and his allies. In 2016, Trump “claimed that he really had won the popular vote when you ‘subtract’ what he said were millions of illegal voters.” The goal of this lie seems to be to create doubt about election results in 2024. This is not the first time Trump has done this as the nation saw on January 6, 2021. Even more nefarious, this increased concern over noncitizen voting has the potential to “propel voter suppression.” The House recently passed a bill that “lays the groundwork to ultimately require citizens to produce a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote. Millions of eligible Americans don’t have ready access to that paperwork.” And this lack of access is not because they are noncitizens. Furthermore, this rhetoric fuels xenophobia and conspiracy theories which cripple the credibility and strength of our democratic system as a whole.
We will have to wait and see how Kentucky citizens vote in the upcoming election.