Eight states will vote to amend their state constitutions in November to ban noncitizens from voting in elections. If these amendments pass in Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, it will bring the total number of states with constitutions specifying only citizens are allowed to vote to 20.
The little known dark money group Americans for Citizens Voting (ACV) is backing and tracking the effort. Since 2018, voters in six states have added the amendment to their state constitutions.
ACV has its eyes locked on another 11 states in 2025: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, according to its website.
ACV has enlisted the help of the pay-to-play American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to move a model state constitution amendment in these states and others to ban noncitizens from voting in elections.
It is already illegal for green card holders or undocumented immigrants to vote in federal and state elections in all states, but ALEC’s “Citizen Only Voting Amendment” would extend the voting prohibition to elections at all levels of government.
This is despite the fact that evidence of noncitizen voting is scarce. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported. As the nonpartisan law and policy institute points out, even the Charles Koch-founded and funded Cato Institute determined that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”
ALEC offered a workshop on the nonissue of noncitizens voting at its 51st Annual Meeting in July. Called “States Must Do: Protecting the Vote,” the training session was billed with the false claim that “the threat of non-citizen participation in our US elections is real,” the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported.
According to an ACV pamphlet distributed at the ALEC meeting and obtained by CMD, passing a bill instead of an amendment banning noncitizen voting isn’t sufficient because “a statute may be ruled unconstitutional by the courts and a statute can be changed by any future legislature.”
Senator Ben Brown (R–MO) introduced the model amendment to ALEC’s Federalism and International Relations task force, as indicated by an agenda for the meeting obtained by CMD. Brown authored the resolution passed in Missouri that led to the ballot measure being placed in front of voters in November, which ACV touted on its website.
The Federalism and International Relations task force roster obtained by CMD shows that ACV Research Director Becky Arps is a task force member, as are 44 ALEC state senators and representatives from the 11 states ACV is targeting in 2025 and.
ALEC also circulated the “Only Citizens Vote Model Policy” at the meeting, CMD first reported. In following up last week, The Guardian reported that the model originated from the Only Citizens Vote Coalition. A newsletter obtained by the newspaper stated that insurrectionist Cleta Mitchell; Chris Chmielenski, the head of the anti-immigration group Immigration Accountability Project; and Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative worked a crowd of 150 attendees to get the model approved.
An Only Citizens Vote Coalition packet obtained by CMD includes the language for the noncitizens policy and labels it “proposed ALEC model policy” at the top.
The agenda for the task force meeting shows that Senator Patricia Rucker (R–WV), both an ALEC board treasurer and state chair, presented the ALEC model.
The Only Citizens Vote Coalition was a chairman-level sponsor of the ALEC meeting, according to a sponsorship list obtained by CMD. Both the Coalition and Americans for Citizen Voting were exhibitors.
GOP Megadonor Richard Uihlein Funding Effort?
Although ACV claims to be a nonprofit, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) states on its website that it had its 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status revoked in August of 2022. The IRS also doesn’t include ACV on its business master file for Virginia as of August 12. None of ACV’s IRS filings are available on the IRS website or in the E-File system that sites like ProPublica, GuideStar, and others pull from.
Funding information for ACV is also difficult to verify. The obscure Liberty Initiative Fund (LIF) based in Woodbridge, Virginia has funneled $110,000 (2020–22) to ACV and is the only funder of the organization CMD has identified.
In what is probably not a coincidence, LIF and ACV share the same address in Virginia, and LIF links directly to ACV’s site from its “only citizens vote” issue on its homepage.
In addition, ACV’s chairman, Paul Jacob, is the president of LIF. His LinkedIn page shows that he is also president of the Citizens in Charge Foundation, which states its mission as “to protect and spread ballot initiative rights.” Jacob, a libertarian activist, led U.S. Term Limits between 1992 and 2007. The nonprofit organization seeks to add term limits for congressional representatives to the U.S. Constitution through an Article V constitutional convention.
Restoration of America (dba Restoration Action) contributed $1.8 million — 33% of its budget — to LIF between 2021 and 2022, CMD has found. Beyond this 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization, the only other known LIF funder is the Humane Society Legislative Fund, which contributed $25,000 for an Oklahoma ballot initiative in 2016, according to IRS filings.
Restoration of America is run by GOP operative Doug Truax and is part of a constellation of nonprofits and PACs closely aligned and funded by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein that includes Restoration PAC, Fair Courts America, and the Voter Reference Foundation, a subsidiary of Restoration Action.
Editor’s note: Following publication, ACV’s Vice President of Outreach Jack Tomczak responded to CMD’s media inquiry to state that Americans for Citizen Voting is an LLC of Liberty Initiative Fund.
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This is unconstitutional because voting is a right and not a privilege and nobody should have to check birth certificates and if this law goes into effect, it should not be enforced. The government should make it easier to vote not harder, this is violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act.