President Donald Trump wants to make sure that no noncitizens vote in federal elections.
Can we all agree that this is a worthy goal?
Fun fact 1: It’s been illegal since 1924 for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
Fun fact 2: A 1996 law, signed by President Bill Clinton, added criminal penalties: up to five years in prison for registering to vote, possible deportation for actually doing so.
For now, the system is basically aimed at those noncitizens: Don’t do this, and if you do it and you get caught, here’s what will happen to you.
Trump wants to turn that around and put the onus on citizens: To be able to vote, you need to prove you’re a citizen.
He recently issued an executive order to spell out how he wants this to work. At least four lawsuits have been filed to challenge the order, including one from Democratic attorneys general in 19 states who say this is an infringement on states’ rights, an argument now being one that both left and right use if it suits their purposes. House Republicans last week passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which could codify Trump’s goal, although that measure differs in some details and faces an uncertain future in the Senate, so my focus here is strictly the executive order.
Virginia’s election law would run afoul of Trump’s order: Virginia is one of 13 states that allow mail ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted (14 if you count Texas, where that provision only applies to ballots mailed from outside the country, so seems designed to accommodate military personnel). Curiously, this is not a practice that splits along the usual lines: Seven of those 13 states are clearly Democratic, but five are strongly Republican (examples: Mississippi, West Virginia) and one is a swing state (Nevada). The philosophy here is akin to your tax return: You don’t need to get that into the Internal Revenue Service’s grubby hands by midnight April 15, you just need it to be postmarked by then.
That’s not what catches my eye with Trump’s executive order, though. It’s this: If he’s successful, his order would have the effect of disenfranchising many Republican voters and leaving a federal electorate that would skew strongly Democratic.
Yes, you read that right.
Trump may have thought he had a good idea, but the way his order is worded, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to find themselves unable to vote.
Here’s how:
Trump’s order lists four ways that voters can prove their citizenship. None of them involves a birth certificate. That’s because Trump also wants to eliminate so-called “birthright citizenship,” under which birth in the United States automatically makes someone a citizen. That would seem to defy the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, but that will eventually get sorted out by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, see my column on the 19th-century Virginia lawyer who argued against birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court, and lost, in the 1800s.
Instead, his order specifies that any of these four documents will suffice:
- A passport.
- A REAL ID driver’s license, a relatively new class of driver’s licenses.
- A military identification card.
- “A valid Federal or State government-issued photo identification if such identification indicates that the applicant is a United States citizen or if such identification is otherwise accompanied by proof of United States citizenship.”
This sets up a Kafka-esque situation. How do we prove that we’re U.S. citizens if a birth certificate doesn’t do the job? A passport, you say? Well, to get a passport, the State Department requires a birth certificate or a certificate of naturalization, a consular report of a birth abroad to an American parent, or something called a “Certificate of Citizenship” — yet the rules for that certificate require, yes, a birth certificate. While Trump has indirectly ruled that a birth certificate won’t suffice directly, it suffices indirectly because a birth certificate is required for some of these other documents. If he believes a birth certificate should not be valid for proof of citizenship, then many of these other requirements are built on a faulty foundation because they ultimately rely on a birth certificate.
Let’s skip over that dilemma, though, and get to the main point. With the exception of the military identification card, the other documents are far more likely to be held by Democratic voters than Republican voters. There are two ways we know this: the data on who holds passports and who has a REAL ID license.
Passports: People in Democratic-voting metro areas are more likely to hold them than people in Republican-voting rural areas
The percentage of American adults with passports is unclear for technical reasons that don’t particularly matter here, but the general figures I’ve seen range from 45% to 56%, so roughly half or so of the adult population. Whatever the true number is, an analysis by Michigan State University shows that people in Democratic-voting areas are more likely to have a passport than those in Republican-voting areas. That reflects the modern realignment of American politics, with Democrats strongest in high-income, high-education areas and Republicans strongest in more working-class areas. Who’s more likely to need a passport for that trip to Paris?
Let’s dig into the specific data. The Michigan State University School of Journalism has created a database called the American Communities Project. The school has hoovered up lots of data and then used it to identify 15 different types of communities. That’s the prism through which it views other data.
In communities identified as “urban suburbs,” about 64% of adults hold a passport, the Michigan State analysis shows. That’s the highest number.
In communities identified as “evangelical hubs,” about 38% hold passports. That’s the lowest number.
In Virginia, the Northern Virginia suburbs and the Richmond suburbs — all Democratic-voting places — are identified as “urban suburbs.” Most of the counties in Southwest Virginia are classified as “evangelical hubs.” That likely means about 64% of those in the state’s bluest counties can qualify for voting just by waving a passport, while only 38% in the state’s reddest counties can. While a passport isn’t the only document allowed to prove citizenship, this data does show how Trump’s criteria give an advantage to Democratic areas. Or, at least, certain Democratic areas. Of the 16 types of communities that Michigan State identified, the only one with a low percentage of passports that was also a Democratic-voting community was those identified as “the African American South.” However, the percentage of people in those places with passports is a smidge higher than the Republican-voting “evangelical hubs.” The bottom line is still the same: Democrats are more likely to have passports than Republicans.
REAL ID: Drivers in Republican-voting rural areas are the least likely to have these licenses.
Maybe the passport analysis above is a little too indirect for you. And maybe you’re fine if you never go to Paris anyway. However, when it comes to REAL ID, we have hard data that also skews in Democrats’ favor.
The Department of Motor Vehicles reports that 59% of Virginia drivers now have a REAL ID, which means 41% don’t.
DMV also keeps a geographical breakdown, based on its administrative regions. We don’t know the precise percentage of drivers in each part of the state with REAL ID, but we do know that DMV issues a lot more REAL ID licenses in Northern Virginia than in Southwest Virginia. That’s not surprising given the relative populations. More importantly, though, people in Northern Virginia have obtained REAL ID at a higher rate than in Southwest Virginia. In fact, Southwest Virginia has the lowest compliance rate in Virginia, based on figures DMV shared about where REAL ID license have been issued. The DMV’s Fairfax region accounts for 35.3% of the population but 38.05% of the REAL IDs. Meanwhile, the DMV’s Southwest region accounts for 4.6% of the population but only 2.85% of the REAL IDs. That may not seem like much of a difference until you look at it this way: REAL ID sign-ups in Northern Virginia are running about 8% higher than that region’s share of the population while in Southwest Virginia they’re about 30% lower.
That shouldn’t surprise us. States with a big share of counties in Appalachia have low rates for REAL ID. In Kentucky, 36% of drivers have REAL ID. In West Virginia, the figure is 38%. Both are obviously much lower than Virginia’s overall rate of 59%. By contrast, Maryland is at 98%.
By the REAL ID numbers, it sure looks as if a bigger percentage of people in Northern Virginia would be eligible to vote in a federal election than in Southwest Virginia. Or, to put it more bluntly, there are likely to be more Democrats with REAL ID than Republicans. If Republicans in Southwest Virginia fret about being outvoted by Northern Virginia now, just wait until REAL ID is one of the criteria for being eligible to vote in a presidential election or congressional election. REAL ID would create a Virginia electorate more Democratic than it is now. The same thing would likely happen in other states, with Democratic-voting metro areas obtaining a structural advantage over Republican-voting rural areas.
Now, if Trump’s executive order really does hold, I’m sure many people not currently eligible under his rules would go out and get a REAL ID or a passport or some other sort of government-approved identification. However, as someone who has gotten both, I can tell you — it’s a hassle. I’m fortunate in that I’ve been in a position to take off time from work to go sit in a government office and go through the process. Not everyone is. A shift worker in a rural area, where distances are further, will have a harder time getting these documents than someone in a more flexible working environment in a metro area. There was a time when that would have benefited Republicans and disadvantaged Democrats. Those times have passed. Republicans today rely on working-class voters, particularly those in rural areas — the very places where people are the least likely to have the required documentation for voting.
Trump has inadvertently written rules that, in today’s political universe, would probably disenfranchise many of his own supporters and give Democrats a built-in advantage not just in Virginia but in every swing state and swing district in the country.
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