Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry is pushing an effort that he says will enhance voting integrity in the state.
On Monday, Gov. Landry signed an executive order requiring all Louisiana agencies provide a disclaimer to anyone who applies for state services or assistance that it is illegal to register to vote if you are not a United States citizen. That disclaimer will be additional to the warning that already appears on the voter registration form.
"The right to vote in the United States' elections is a privilege that's reserved for American citizens because citizenship should mean something," Gov. Landry said. "In Louisiana, election integrity is a top priority."
The executive order is the latest measure Gov. Landry and state lawmakers have taken to prevent non-citizens from voting in Louisiana elections.
"This year, we signed 11 bills this session to improve Louisiana's elections system," Gov. Landry said. "We signed, specifically, Senate Bill 436 by Senator Fesi that will allow the secretary of state to ask for prove of citizenship from those registering to vote."
According to Gov. Landry, President Joe Biden's immigration policies have made it easier for undocumented immigrants to register to vote in the United States and in Louisiana.
"When the Biden/Harris Administration dogwhistled people into this country, they let them in right underneath the legal port of entries," Gov. Landry said. "You couldn't send them there because that would have been illegal. So they dogwhistled them across the Rio Grande."
According to a political scientist, Gov. Landry's quest for election integrity has little to do with actual election security and more to do with rallying the conservative base before the November presidential election.
"It's a way of trying to fit the narrative that this a problem when it's not one," Dr. Robert Hogan, LSU political science professor said. "Illegal immigrants voting in elections has not been shown to be a big problem in most places in the United States."
Hogan says Hogan says research has shown that Louisiana's election systems--and election systems across the United States--are secure when it comes to non-citizens voting. During Monday's news conference, Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry said only 48 non-citizens have been removed from Louisiana's voter rolls since 2022.
According to Hogan, Landry's rhetoric serves to drum up support for the Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.
"The big thing, what it does, of course, is it helps mobilize their base of support, which is anti-immigrant, and it may increase the voting of those groups in the Republican Party," Hogan said. "I think it's a way he contributes to the Trump campaign nationally."
According to Hogan, the Trump campaign can highlight Landry's executive order as fodder to rally his anti-immigrant supporters. Hogan says Trump can point to Landry's executive order and claim that voter security is a problem in Louisiana and in other states, contributing to the narrative that American elections are not secure.
"It's also something that conservative organizations and the Republican Party have utilized as a way of raising money to demonstrate that they are doing something about a problem," Hogan said.
While Hogan notes that this could rally Republicans around the Trump campaign, this effort could demobilize citizen voters in Louisiana. In fact, Hogan says this citizenship push could hurt some people who intend to vote for Trump, especially older voters who might not be able to find their birth certificates or other citizenship documents.
"Academic studies have looked at this issue, too, and states that have voter ID laws and all of these extra requirements that are needed to show citizenship, they find that it doesn't have the partisan impact that the Republican groups pushing these laws would hope that they have," Hogan said. "They aren't demobilizing for a couple of reasons. One is it has a negative impact on some Republican voters, and Democratic parties in states that are competitive at the state level have redoubled their efforts into mobilization to try to push back on these sorts of things."
