The Growing Red Wave Against Non-Citizen Voting

Americans are rallying to protect their right to vote in key states across the country, and more are joining the fight each week

Outsourcing the vote to non-citizens will prove a bridge too far for Democrats.

The citizen-only voting movement is spreading across the states as new initiatives to protect voting rights appear on the November ballot, most recently in South Carolina and Missouri. New polling shows voters in 6 states poised to enact the biggest roll-back of the Left’s election errors in American history—with promising results for Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

North Carolina looks to be the 7th. Last month, Republican State Sen. Brad Overcash announced a bill (SB 630) to add a Citizen-Only Voting Amendment to the Tarheel State’s Nov. 2024 ballot.

Restoration News obtained a just-released poll by Americans for Citizen Voting, the advocacy group behind this grassroots push, showing a stunning 89 percent of voters—split near-evenly between Biden and Trump supporters—believe only U.S. citizens should have the right to vote. Just 6 percent believe non-citizens should be allowed to vote in North Carolina elections.

Fully 87 percent say they plan to vote “yes” on a Citizen-Only Voting Amendment if it makes it to the November ballot. Interestingly, 16 percent of those polled are naturalized U.S. citizens—eliminating the Left’s absurd argument that such measures are hostile to lawful immigrants.

“A whopping 9 out of 10 North Carolina voters want action to make certain their constitution is clear: Only American citizens can vote,” Americans for Citizen Voting chairman Paul Jacob told Restoration News. “Senate Bill 630 will put that amendment on the ballot this November if Republican legislators do their job.”

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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts

Though far-reaching, the premise behind these measures is simple. If enacted, the initiative would amend North Carolina’s constitution in a subtle but powerful way—from “Every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” to “Only a citizen of the United States” 18 years or older may vote.

If that seems commonsense or unnecessary, consider that the Left used loopholes like this to quietly pass non-citizen voting laws in blue cities nationwide—including Washington, D.C., whose law is so expansive it allows Russian and Chinese embassy staff to cast a ballot.

In fact, of all 50 state constitutions just 11 explicitly say non-citizens cannot vote. Leftists have conveniently interpreted that “oversight” to enfranchise non-Americans in the other 39 states because, hey, the law doesn’t say we can’t do that!

(RELATED: Will Illegal Aliens Choose the 2024 Republican Nominee in Arizona?)

Though the Left started its project in earnest around 2015, the wave of Citizen-Only Voting Amendments has grown even faster since 2022. That’s when 6 states—Florida, Ohio, Alabama, Louisiana, North Dakota, and blue Colorado—passed ballot initiatives by 30-point margins.

Now South Carolina and Missouri join Kentucky, Iowa, Idaho, and the critical swing state Wisconsin in adding a similar amendment to their November ballots. Clever conservatives can and should use that to drive Republican votes up and down the rest of the ticket. And the Left is noticing.

Attack articles by Democrat-aligned media outlets have exploded in the past month on Republicans’ made-up threat of non-citizen voting, from under 500 articles in March to nearly 1,700 in May—and climbing.

If this coordinated response suggests the Left is alarmed by the Right’s red wave, the retort is as incoherent as it is bitter. There is no non-citizen voting, we’re told, except when there is; and anyway that’s democracy so we should want more of it.

Recall senior Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD) blabbing last year that the Founding Fathers did not “intend” a “citizenship qualification” for voting as justification for voting against any effort to repeal it.

Why else would 148 House Democrats vote against repealing D.C.’s non-citizen voting law last week, if they don’t support it everywhere?

Activists certainly want it. The Institute for Responsive Government, a front for the multi-billion-dollar Arabella “dark money” network that agitates for automatic voter registration, claims “there is no evidence to support the claim that there are waves of non-citizens voting.” Conservative efforts to stop it are “designed to stoke fear and undermine confidence in our democracy.”

Then there’s the press.

“Trump and Mike Johnson zero in on noncitizen voting. It’s already illegal and very rare,” writes NBC.

The “Trump-Johnson pledge to target noncitizen voting is an old tactic” by anti-immigration racists, says Votebeat.

The Kansas City Star calls Missouri’s Citizen-Only Voting Amendment “deceptive” because “it’s already illegal.”

“Trump allies push bill to bar non-citizen voting, even though it’s already illegal,” writes the Guardian, painting the effort as a “conspiracy theory” by “extremists try[ing] to tie immigration to elections.”

In Ohio, Sec. of State Frank LaRose (R) “found 137 non-citizens registered to vote. It’s not as serious as it sounds,” says NPR, which proceeds to cite the far-left election lawyer and Democrat agitator David Becker as its credible source.

When House Republicans introduced the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act requiring proof of citizenship to vote, AP fell over itself claiming the legislation is unnecessary—while admitting non-citizens have been caught “illegally registering and even casting ballots.”

Even that’s downplaying the truth. A recent study by Just Facts, a (genuinely) nonpartisan data-driven site, found that 10–27 percent of non-citizen adults in the U.S. are illegally registered to vote using statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. That translates to 2–5 million illegally registered voters—far and away enough to swing the election to Democrats if even a fraction of them voted in key states.

Congress and President Bill Clinton outlawed non-citizen voting in federal elections in 1996 but failed to ban it in state and local elections. Why are Democrats so opposed to adding one more safeguard? As leftists constantly remind us, voter suppression is real—except, apparently, when non-Americans cancel out the votes of Americans.

(DEEP-DIVE: Citizen-Only Voting Is Winning in 2024)