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The GOP-led House voted to advance legislation to revoke a rule that Washington, D.C., council members had passed allowing non-citizens to vote in municipal elections.
A total of 52 Democrats supported the measure, while 143 Democrats voted against it, resulting in a final vote of 262 to 143. The law was approved by the progressive city council in 2022 and recently withstood a court challenge earlier this year, Fox News reported.
Republicans opposing the bill warned that allowing non-Americans to influence the election of local officials in the nation’s capital could negatively impact national security.
“What we’re doing is, we are talking about passing a law that prohibits citizens of foreign countries from voting in elections in D.C. It prohibits people that are here illegally from voting in elections. It prohibits spies from China from voting in elections. It prohibits people that are here from Russia that have wishes of ill will in the United States from voting in the elections in D.C.,” Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., said during debate for the bill.
GOP lawmakers have accused Democrats of trying to influence the ballot box by encouraging illegal immigrants to register to vote – something the left has denied.
Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, who introduced the bill last year, emphasized the narrow margins by which critical elections have been decided in recent years. He argued that allowing undocumented individuals the opportunity to vote could potentially sway an entire race.
“They’re encouraging people to vote for mayor, for attorney general, for members of the state Board of Education and more. And some may argue that, yes, these are just local elections. Well, there are democratic elections that regularly determine taxation, the criminal code…and the election of the various city council members who decide ordinances like who gets to vote. Not to mention that many of these are decided by close margins,” Pfluger said.
Fox added:
It’s the latest effort in a wider crackdown on voting security that House GOP leaders are mounting roughly six months before the November 2024 elections.
The House-wide vote on D.C.’s local law comes on the same day that a key House committee is poised to advance a bill to heighten enforcement and penalties for undocumented people who vote in federal elections.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised a key question following the court’s 6-3 ruling this week to allow a Louisiana congressional district map that includes a second mostly black district to be used in the fall elections.
The Supreme Court was called upon to intervene following a string of legal disputes regarding Louisiana’s congressional district redistricting. Despite being historically Republican, the state faced challenges after a district judge ruled in 2022 that a prior map drawn by GOP-controlled state legislatures infringed upon the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Subsequently, Louisiana’s state legislature endorsed a new map in January that incorporated a second black-majority district. The previous map aimed to maintain the “status quo” in the state, featuring only one district with a majority of black voters, despite black residents comprising roughly one-third of the state’s population.
Later, disputes over congressional district boundaries were taken to a federal three-judge panel following a challenge by a group of Louisiana voters, who identified as “non-African American,” against the redrawn map. The panel determined that the new map was unconstitutional based solely on racial factors.
On Wednesday, all six conservative Supreme Court justices aligned with a group of black voters to temporarily suspend the panel’s ruling. The decision paves the way for voters to have two black-majority districts in the upcoming November general election.
Halting the panel’s decision will also allow voters to file a complete appeal of the ruling in April. Republicans in Louisiana had urged the Supreme Court to intervene in the case to ensure sufficient time to prepare for Election Day.
