KS and AZ Win Case to Require Proof of Citizenship for Voting

"Kansas and Arizona scored a big victory on ballot box integrity laws, one that the losing side is already appealing," reports Ken Kulkowski @ Breitbart.com.

In a 2013 case, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that state voting laws are generally preempted by federal law.

But in his opinion for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that federal law allowed states to request that the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—a federal agency created in 2002—include citizenship documentation items in any state’s customized version of the “Federal Form” designed by the EAC. ... Scalia noted that Louisiana had received such permission years ago; therefore, there was no good reason for denying it to Arizona or other states. He added that any state requesting a citizenship-proof requirement could sue if its request was denied.

Kansas and Arizona followed Scalia's roadmap, making requests to the EAC and subsequently suing after the EAC denied them.

Now they have won in federal district court in Wichita, Kansas. In a 28-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren ordered the EAC to grant the requests Kansas and Arizona made months ago.

“Judge Melgren’s decision is very carefully researched and well-reasoned,” [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach, who is also an accomplished law professor, told the media. “This is going to be a difficult decision for them to overturn on appeal.”... This case will now go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver.

In a related article, Bryan Preston writes:

Critics claim that the citizenship requirement is discriminatory, but Senior Legal Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, Hans von Spakovsky, who studies the impact of election integrity laws on elections and called that charge “silly,” noting that it’s a felony for non-citizens to vote in US federal elections. Therefore, verifying citizenship is just a matter of enforcing existing election law.

Von Spakovsky made his comments Tuesday evening on a conference call organized by True the Vote. The Houston, Texas-based organization is a grass-roots group dedicated to improving the security and integrity of elections across the United States. Its president and founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, moderated the conference call.

Von Spakovsky noted that the court found that the federal government acted well outside its legal powers, when it fought against requiring proof of citizenship and tried to force Kansas to change its own voter registration forms.

Interestingly, jury pool integrity is a secondary reason for requiring proof of citizenship when individuals register to vote, since jury pools are drawn from voter registrations. Klukowski reports Arizona's experience:

“There were over 200 people who swore on jury commissioner forms that they were not citizens who were found to have registered to vote,” Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne explained to another outlet. Noting that only ten percent of voters receive a jury summons, Horne reasoned that this means a bare minimum of 2,000 fraudulent registrations had occurred, and he noted that statewide races had been lost by fewer votes than that.

These 200 people admitted they were not citizens. One can only wonder if there have been others who lied about their citizenship status on jury commissioner forms and ended up casting a vote in a jury decision.