The New York Times reports:

As President Trump digs in on his demand that senators pass a strict voter identification bill, lawmakers debating the potential impacts of the Republican-backed SAVE America Act might look to one place that already tried it — Kansas.

In 2013, Republicans in that state passed legislation so similar it bore a nearly identical name — the Secure and Fair Elections, or SAFE, Act. It, too, aimed to root out voting fraud by noncitizens. As voters nationwide would be required to do under the SAVE Act, those seeking to register to vote in Kansas had to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate.

The results weren’t great.

A federal judge struck down the law within a few years, after it was found to have blocked tens of thousands of eligible voters from registering while catching fewer than thirty noncitizens trying to do the same.

Many of those who were blocked — young Kansans and less politically attuned voters who were seeking to register for the first time — were from constituencies that have flocked to Mr. Trump since his rise in 2016.

Still, the state’s current elected officials are ready to try it again at the federal level. Asked about the Kansas experiment in an interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal, Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican, said that expecting citizens to provide a birth certificate or a passport in order to vote was still reasonable.

“I think that the benefits of having safe and secure elections outweigh that potential concern,” he said.

The Kansas cautionary tale started in 2013, when the documentary proof of citizenship law, which was passed in 2011, went into force. A federal judge struck down the law as unconstitutional in 2018, by which time the law had blocked the registration of around 31,000 otherwise eligible voters, or about 12 percent of all those who had tried to register for the first time.

Among them was Steven Fish, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that successfully challenged the law. Mr. Fish, hoping to vote for the first time, was prevented from registering when he couldn’t furnish the necessary documents. Like about half of American citizens, he didn’t have a passport, and, having been born on a since-shuttered military base, he was unable to track down his birth certificate.

“With these numbers, with that success ratio, I’m not really sure why anybody would think that nationwide this is a good idea,” Mr. Fish said of the federal bill.

Moreover, the federal judge found that while the state law was in effect, requiring documentary proof of citizenship had thwarted only 28 noncitizen applicants from registering. And in the roughly 13 years leading up to when the law took effect, just 39 noncitizens had successfully registered to vote.

Even those few cases were most likely the result of human or administrative errors, not a real intent to commit voter fraud, said Lorraine Minnite, an associate professor at Rutgers University who served as an expert witness in the case that struck down the Kansas law.

“There was very little evidence of noncitizen voting in Kansas, either before 2011 or after,” Ms. Minnite said. [Continue reading…]