Citizenship amendment is unnecessary
You can vote if you are poor. You can vote if you are rich.
You can vote if you stand. You can vote if you sit. You can vote if you are smart or if you are not. You can vote in person or vote through the mail. You can vote if you are black, white, red, green, blue or cream.
As long as you have a photo ID, you don’t even need to know how to read.
You can vote from here, or vote from there, you can vote from anywhere.
Unless you are a felon serving a sentence, you can even vote from jail.
The rules are simple and pretty clean. You must be a U.S citizen and you must be at least 18. That last part deserves repeating. In order to vote you must be a U.S. citizen and you must be at least 18 years old.
This is the law of the land in Wisconsin. It is also the law when it comes to any federal or statewide election anywhere in the country.
Voting is the fundamental right and responsibility of citizenship. Rather than being subjects under a government, citizens are part of the process and have a voice in that government.
The Republican-controlled state legislature seems to think there is room for confusion and is asking voters to approve a statewide referendum to amend the state constitution to declare that only U.S. citizens can vote in elections.
What is next? Will the state legislature be asking for constitutional amendments requiring the sun to only rise in the east and set in the west or to declare that Tuesday will follow Monday in the work week, or that there are no words in the English language that rhyme with orange.
It is not so much that the proposed amendment is a bad idea, but that at best it is unnecessary and at worst seeks to undermine the election process by raising false fears about who could be voting.
There has been no one clamoring to extend the right to vote to non-citizens in Wisconsin, nor should they.
Nor does the proposed referendum address any burning issue regarding perceived election security. According to the Heritage Foundation, which tracks cases of election fraud across the country, there have been 85 cases nationwide involving allegations of noncitizen voting from 2002 to 2023. This is out of roughly 2 billion votes. To put this in perspective, it is roughly the equivalent of going up to a plow truck loaded with sand and pulling out 85 grains.
The proposed statewide constitutional amendment referendum will do nothing to change the law or safeguard elections. Noncitizens are not eligible to vote in Wisconsin and attempting to do so is a crime that could get them deported.
The proposed amendment exists for the sole purpose of scaring people and raising unwarranted concerns about election interference.
Vote yes or vote no on it, that is your choice and your right as a citizen. It is truly a case where the outcome doesn’t matter.
Since 2017 all Wisconsin high school graduates have been required to pass a citizenship civics test. Wisconsin legislators should be required to pass the same test if for no other reason than to prevent them from wasting time and money on crackpot amendment proposals.
The Central Wisconsin Publications Editorial Board consists of publisher Kris O’Leary and editor Brian Wilson.
