Kathy Kmonicek/AP Photo
Stephen McCutcheon, right, gives a sample Republican ballot to Douglas Frick outside the West Asheville Public Library on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina.
Republicans long have used patriotism and fear to control and exploit Southern white voters. Today, the fears surrounding the growing political power of African Americans and other communities of color have led Republican state lawmakers to draw heavily gerrymandered state and congressional districts to contain those voters, strategies that lead to deeper political polarization.
In 2024, those aims led North Carolina Republican state lawmakers to put a ballot initiative before voters that would prevent noncitizens from voting. It read: “Only a citizen of the United States who is 18 years of age and possessing the qualifications set out in this Article, shall be entitled to vote at any election by the people of the State, except as herein otherwise provided.” The measure overwhelmingly passed, with 77.5 percent of North Carolina voters supporting the amendment.
The simply titled “Constitutional Amendment” sounds patriotic, and the fine print appears in keeping with America’s small-d democratic ideals, as it’s designed to bar noncitizens from illegally voting in federal elections. Yet both the North Carolina and federal constitutions already prohibit noncitizen voting. Under the federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the minimum requirement for voting is citizenship: A person must be born in the United States or be naturalized. But the measure aimed to buttress the GOP contention that “updating” the constitution would hinder so-called voter fraud—which is already virtually nonexistent in this country.
“It’s part of a pervasive propaganda campaign to call into question the integrity of our elections,” Steven Greene, a North Carolina State University political science professor, told the Prospect. “There’s just no evidence of the types of fraud which Republicans are regularly accusing our election officials of.”
Noncitizen voting measures are a worrying development. Seven other states—Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—all voted to amend their state constitutions to ban noncitizens from participating in elections. This comes after the House GOP passed a bill in July that restricts noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Florida, Colorado, and North Dakota also have revised their voting regulations in recent years to cut down on alleged fraud.
Since 2016, conservatives have pushed falsehoods about widespread voter fraud by “illegal immigrants.” This fear has its roots in the “great replacement” theory, a white nationalist fear that lax immigration policies and declining birth rates among whites are features of an organized effort to replace the white population.
Unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud are used to intimidate residents and strike voters from rolls in communities likely to vote against GOP candidates. From 2015 to 2022, the North Carolina State Board of Elections team only had eight cases of noncitizens attempting to vote; most of those cases pertained to felons who voted and people who voted twice.
Anti-immigrant sentiment permeates North Carolina politics. Democracy NC’s Joselle Torres told the Prospect that Jim Womack, head of the Lee County Republicans “Election Integrity Team,” a grassroots volunteer group monitoring election processes, has told his volunteers to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” on the voter rolls for “potential challenges.”
The group had placed signs in Spanish outside North Carolina polling sites indicating that any noncitizen who voted would be subject to deportation. In some cases, the messages instilled fear and confusion in eligible voters and dissuaded them from casting a ballot. Shortly before the election, Democracy NC ended up sending a cease and desist letter to the group.
Before the election, some states worked overtime to flag “problematic” voters. In October, Virginia purged about 1,600 people from the voting rolls who were suspected of being noncitizens and ended up ensnaring a number of American citizens in the process. Alabama also started purging more than 3,000 registered voters in August and later admitted that the list included naturalized citizens. The Ohio secretary of state cut hundreds of voters from the polls using the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles and jury duty data. But illegally registered voters were just a small fraction of the state’s voters. In June, Tennessee election officials sent notices to roughly 14,000 registered voters, asking them to verify their citizenship by showing a valid birth certificate at their voting location. (The Brennan Center has found that around 21 million eligible voters could not quickly access their birth certificates.)
In a divided America, these moves will only exacerbate political tensions. In North Carolina, the constitutional amendment puts Democratic politicians on the defensive: If liberals bristle at procedures designed to “prevent” noncitizens from voting, conservatives may try to paint them as complicit in a wider “scheme” to undermine voting, because why else would an American allow noncitizens to “interfere” with elections? “When it comes to foundational elements of democracy, there’s before Trump and after Trump,” Greene says. “It’s playing a risky game with our democracy.”
