Voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota and West Virginia will decide ballot measures this November that would explicitly limit voting in state and local elections to U.S. citizens, continuing a wave of similar amendments that has swept the country since 2018 and that has yet to lose a single time at the polls.
What each measure would do
Arkansas voters will consider the Citizenship Requirement for Voting Amendment, a legislative constitutional amendment. Kansas has its own Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment on the ballot, as does South Dakota, where the measure is formally designated Constitutional Amendment J. West Virginia’s version is also a legislative constitutional amendment. Alaska’s measure stands apart procedurally: it is a citizen-initiated state statute rather than a constitutional amendment, marking the first time this type of citizenship-voting measure has been proposed as a statute rather than a constitutional change, according to Ballotpedia’s research.
Federal law already restricts noncitizen voting
It’s worth noting that federal law has barred noncitizens from voting in presidential and congressional elections since 1996. These state measures instead target the small number of local and state-level elections — such as some municipal races — where citizenship requirements are governed by state rather than federal law, closing what supporters describe as a loophole and what critics call a largely symbolic measure aimed at a practice that is already exceedingly rare.
An unbroken winning streak
Since 2018, voters nationwide have decided 15 constitutional amendments adding or strengthening citizenship voting requirements — and all 15 have passed, with average support of 73%. Eight of those amendments appeared on the 2024 ballot alone. This represents a second historical wave of such measures; a first wave, from 1894 to 1926, saw voters decide 20 measures restricting earlier state provisions that had allowed certain noncitizens to vote, approving 17 of them. No statewide measure has ever proposed expanding noncitizen voting rights — that pattern exists only at the local level, where voters have been closely split, approving nine of 18 local measures to authorize or expand noncitizen voting since 1991.
Why proponents are pushing these measures
Supporters of the citizenship-only measures argue they provide a clear, uniform constitutional backstop against the possibility that a future city council or local ballot initiative could extend voting rights to noncitizen residents, as a small number of municipalities nationally have done for local races. Proponents frame the amendments as preemptive and largely uncontroversial affirmations of existing practice, which likely helps explain their consistently lopsided passage margins.
A narrower debate than it appears
Because federal law already prohibits noncitizen voting in the elections that matter most to most voters — congressional and presidential races — the practical effect of these state measures is concentrated on local elections, a distinction that sometimes gets lost in the broader national debate over noncitizen voting and immigration. Critics of the broader citizenship-verification push, including the voting rights groups suing over database-driven purge programs in states like Ohio and Texas, generally do not oppose these ballot measures themselves, since citizenship requirements for state and federal elections are uncontroversial; their concerns center instead on how aggressively states enforce those requirements using error-prone databases.
What’s next
Given the unbroken 15-for-15 passage record since 2018, observers widely expect all five of this November’s measures to pass, continuing a trend that has reshaped state constitutions across the country over the past eight years. The more consequential fights over citizenship and voting this cycle are likely to continue playing out not at the ballot box over these largely symbolic amendments, but in the courts, where lawsuits over how states verify citizenship on existing voter rolls remain very much unresolved.
Photo: Sora Shimazaki / PEXELS via Pexels
