Most debate on this bill lives in slogans. The text is about paperwork rules.
I'm not claiming this will raise or lower turnout. I'm claiming the amendment rewrites the National Voter Registration Act so a State cannot accept and process a federal-election voter registration application unless the applicant presents documentary proof of U.S. citizenship with the application.
The bill also defines what counts as "documentary proof of United States citizenship" (e.g., passport, certain REAL ID/citizenship-indicating IDs, specified birth records, naturalization/citizenship documents) and adds processes for name mismatches and for applicants who can't produce the standard documents.
One historical corollary (simple, and it failed): Kansas tried a proof-of-citizenship registration rule. It was struck down after it blocked over 31,000 registration applications, while the evidence of noncitizen registration presented in the case was small by comparison.
This bill's core move is to put that proof-at-registration requirement directly into federal statute for federal elections.
If you want to argue this bill, the cleanest starting point: registration becomes conditional on producing a qualifying citizenship document.
Having to present your Drivers Licenses aka "Real ID" is pretty low standards. Europe has much stricter rules and to think that this discriminates against minorities flies in the face of the truth. People know how to get ID's and Drivers Licenses so to suddenly present that they have no clue is embarrassing and why we have seen people in the streets being appalled that their elected leaders thing so little of them.
“People know how to get ID” was basically Kansas’s argument.
Courts didn’t buy it when tens of thousands were blocked.
The question isn’t embarrassment. It's statutory conflict and burden.
Interesting considering the rest of the US has been moving towards it and well what one state flags it... You do know that if that were practical then rural America would be the ones who are most disenfranchised. Urban America has a lot better access to the DMV... Its highly likely that they found the rural American part the issue not the urban.
DMV access can be worse in rural areas, so geography can matter. But Kansas’s failure mode wasn’t “rural vs urban”. It was that a proof-of-citizenship gate blocked ~31,000 eligible registrations.
Kansas once required voters to prove citizenship. That didn’t work out so well