The State Election Board wants counties to post signs outside polling places this November stating “U.S. CITIZENS ONLY,” a move voting rights groups panned as unnecessary and possibly intimidating to legitimate voters.
Republican board member Janice Johnston unveiled a sample sign Wednesday at a meeting of the board.
“This is the sign, and I think it’s an easy visual for people to understand — anything to help noncitizens from unwittingly violating election law,” she said.
The board voted 3-1 to email the sign to all 159 counties, encouraging election officials to post the sign at polling locations and election offices. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office had already proposed a similar sign prior to the board’s vote, a spokesperson said.
The three board members voting in favor of the sign are closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, who thanked them each by name during his rally last weekend in Atlanta. Board Chairman John Fervier, an appointee of Gov. Brian Kemp, did not vote, saying he didn’t “care either way.”
Fervier said the board has heard no cases involving noncitizen voters since Kemp appointed him.
“I’m not sure how big of a problem it is at this point,” Fervier said. “I always worry about people creating solutions in search of a problem.”
The lone Democratic board member, Tindall Ghazall, voted against the idea.
Supporters said the sign is a proactive measure and encourages election officials to uphold the law.
“It is much more valuable to our entire electoral process to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote or voting than trying to find, investigate and prosecute cases of noncitizen voting,” Johnston said.
Georgia checks the citizenship status of residents when they register to vote, and voters are required to provide ID before voting in each election. But these safeguards have not stopped noncitizen voting from being a recurring concern among Republicans in the state and among party leaders nationally.
In 2021, Raffensperger pushed for an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting noncitizens from voting, even though it already was illegal to do so under state law. And last month, Raffensperger announced plans to conduct an audit to ensure all registered Georgia voters are U.S. citizens, following a 2022 audit showing zero noncitizen voters.
Caitlin O’Dea, spokesperson for the right-leaning voter registration group Greater Georgia, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the signs are a commonsense effort to discourage noncitizen voters.
“Yet, the Democrat member of our State Election Board voted against it,” she said. “As the left moves further to the extremes on immigration, it underscores exactly why additional protections are needed — to ensure that American elections are decided by American citizens.”
Since the 2020 general election, when a record number of absentee ballots were cast, Republican state lawmakers have passed several bills intended to secure state elections, including new voter ID laws for mail-in voting.
The Republican effort changed the mail-in ballot process, requiring voters to verify their driver’s license number when requesting and before sending out their absentee ballots. Voters who lack a driver’s license are required to submit additional documentation.
Ghazal said she’s concerned the signs could perpetuate a myth that noncitizens are voting.
“The disincentive to vote as a noncitizen is so enormous, because if you vote as a noncitizen, you risk immediate deportation,” Ghazal said.
Voting rights groups say they’re concerned the sign could discourage immigrants who have become citizens from registering to vote in a state that already has stringent voting laws.
“These signs aren’t just unnecessary — they also contribute to the harmful rhetoric that has a chilling effect on legal voting among immigrants and can lead to violence. It is becoming clearer every day that the anti-democratic election denial movement’s goal is to foment chaos this November, including by harnessing racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment to undermine faith in our elections,” the left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight wrote in a statement to the AJC.
