OPINION: Noncitizen voting ban on Idaho ballot is a nonissue

This editorial was published in The Idaho Statesman of Boise.

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Six of one, a half-dozen of the other.

Lots of consequential policies will appear on your ballot Tuesday, from selecting the next leader of the free world to determining how Idaho elections are run, from picking who will represent you in Congress to who your next state legislators will be.

Your vote on a change to the Idaho Constitution isn’t one of them. If you have a vote to cast for dog catcher, that matters more. The point of this amendment isn’t policy. It’s propaganda.

The amendment declares that only U.S. citizens may vote in Idaho elections. That is already the case. There is no indication that anyone means to change it. And the Idaho Legislature already possesses the full authority to ban it in all elections around the state without going to voters and changing the Idaho Constitution — authority it has already exercised by making voting by noncitizens a misdemeanor.

Proponents argue that while the Idaho Constitution declares that a U.S. citizen is a qualified elector, it does not explicitly say that noncitizens are not qualified electors. That could allow some sneaky city (like Boise) to claim that noncitizens can vote, the argument goes.

But that same provision also requires voters to be 18 years old and requires voters to be Idaho residents. For some reason, lawmakers are not rushing to explicitly prohibit toddlers living in Wisconsin from voting in Idaho elections — though that loophole is exactly as real as the supposed citizenship loophole. And cities can’t abrogate Idaho Code.

So is there a major problem with noncitizens voting in our elections?

For any law that exists, you can find some number of instances where it is broken. There are exceedingly few instances of the prohibition on noncitizens voting in Idaho having ever been broken, as the Idaho Capital Sun reported. There is one known instance of a noncitizen voting in Ada County. The state believes there are up to 36 noncitizens who are registered to vote, and it is in the process of determining whether or not they are actually citizens.

For context, there were just under 1 million votes cast in Idaho’s last presidential election. So the rate of noncitizens voting, if those people are in fact are not citizens, can be no higher than 0.00004%.

So this is a nonissue, and the few instances where lawbreaking may have occurred are completely dealt with under existing law. Putting the prohibition on noncitizen voting in the Idaho Constitution won’t make it more illegal, and it won’t improve enforcement.

Consider burglary. It’s already against the law, but it still happens. Is that a problem we should solve by putting a prohibition against burglary in the Constitution, or would that be a completely useless exercise?

This amendment is the same. Whether it passes or fails, noncitizen voting will be illegal.

But the existence of the amendment on the ballot does do one very bad thing: It creates the false impression that there is a serious problem with noncitizens voting in Idaho. In doing so, it undermines confidence in Idaho’s election system despite a total lack of evidence to support that belief.

The amendment gives credence to the brazen lie, repeated often by former President Donald Trump and his acolytes, that voting by noncitizens is common and has swayed elections.

If this amendment passes, it will serve to memorialize our own gullibility. The number of votes cast by noncitizens will be exactly the same — close to none — but the amendment will be standing there, forever a reminder that Idahoans were once dupes to the far-right, Trumpian fantasy that this is a problem.

Vote however you like, but understand that’s what you’re voting on.

TNS