The Anti-Immigrant Roots of Voter Suppression Laws: Case Study Kansas

• In Event: Nativism and Nationalism

Abstract

Using a qualitative approach, this paper examines the anti-immigrant roots of state-level “voter integrity” laws that have been proposed and passed across the United States in the last decade to address alleged voter fraud. Enabled by the Congressional expiration of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, these laws require photo identification or proof of citizenship to vote, restrict absentee ballots and early voting, and repeal same-day voter registration, to name some examples. Between 2006 and 2011, nearly every state considered such restrictive voter access legislation, and half of all states passed such laws (Bentele and O’Brien 2013). Critics argue and scholarship demonstrates, however, that actual instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare (Minnite 2010, Ahlquist et al. 2014), and that these new laws serve mainly to suppress the votes of African-American, poor, and elderly voters (Hajnal et al. 2016).

Given the significant impact these laws have on marginalized groups’ voter turnout, it is important to understand why so many states have considered and/or passed these laws in recent years. Research in this area has been mainly quantitative, highlighting the importance of African-American population share, minority voter turnout, and Republican party dominance, in state-level consideration and/or passage of these laws (Bentele and O’Brien 2013, Biggers and Hanmer 2017). However, these studies have not analyzed the justifications—centered on allegations of voter fraud by non-citizens/immigrants—that have been voiced by proponents seeking to mobilize public support for these laws.

To understand these nativist justifications and how they impact the passage and support for these laws, in this paper I focus specifically on Kansas, which is crucial to understanding the emergence, diffusion, and interweaving of nativist and voter fraud discourses. Here, former Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been a prominent state-level and national proponent of these views, playing a central role in the development and promotion of these laws in Kansas and across the United States. Employing a qualitative, process-tracing approach to analyze data from newspaper and state archives, I explore the evolving public, media, and elite discourses accompanying the passage and legal challenges to two high-profile “voter integrity” laws that Kobach championed in Kansas: the Secure and Fair Elections Act (SAFE Act), a 2011 law requiring residents to show a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers to vote; and the Crosscheck Program, which checks voter records across states to identify people registered to vote in more than one state (30 states are now enrolled). The Kansas case study thus offers an important complement to quantitative research on voter fraud laws, as it clearly highlights the ways in which anti-immigrant discourse is deployed to justify and drum up public support for these laws, the predominant outcome of which is the disenfranchisement of African-American, poor, and elderly Democratic-leaning voters.

Author

• Monica W Varsanyi, CUNY Graduate Center