Supermajority of Americans Support Photo ID, Only U.S. Citizens Voting in Elections: Poll
An overwhelming supermajority of Americans from all political parties and ethnic backgrounds believe that only Americans should vote in U.S. elections, and that voters should have to provide a photo ID before casting their ballot, a new survey has found.
In all, more than eight out of 10 Americans — including a majority of Democrats — support the provisions designed to enhance election integrity, which most Democratic elected officials oppose.
In all, 84% of Americans favor requiring voters to show a photo identification before being given a ballot, and 83% are in favor of “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” Only 15% of Americans oppose each measure.
Support for the election integrity measures cuts deep across members of all political parties and ethnic identities, according to the Gallup poll, released last week. Republicans favored the measures by a near-unanimous margin: 98% of Republicans favor photo identification, and 96% support proof of citizenship for voters. But so did more than eight in 10 registered Independents (84% support both measures). Surprisingly, the vast majority of rank-and-file Democrats also say they would support laws “requiring all voters to provide photo identification at their voting place in order to vote” (67%) and limiting elections to those who can provide reliable proof of their U.S. citizenship (66%).
Although Democratic politicians have likened voter ID laws to Jim Crow — or, as President Joe Biden has said, “Jim Eagle” — the measure has intense support among minority voters. Laws stating that voters must show photo identification are favored by 86% of white voters and 80% of minority voters. (Minority voters are those who identify as Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian, black, Hispanic, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.) Limiting the franchise to those who can prove their U.S. citizenship is backed by more than three-quarters (76%) of non-white voters, as well as 87% of white, non-Hispanic voters.
The question about restricting the vote to U.S. citizens is new; however, the numbers largely track with previous Gallup polls asking about photo identification. In October 2022, the polling organization found 79% of Americans favored such laws, and 21% opposed. Similarly, a Gallup poll conducted in August 2016 found that 80% of U.S. voters favored photo identification laws, and 19% opposed them.
Significantly, Democratic support for photo ID laws plummeted 10 points during the Trump and Biden years. While similar supermajorities of Republicans and Independents favored photo ID laws in 2016, so did nearly two-thirds (63%) of Democrats, compared to a bare majority (53%) of Democrats in 2022.
These widely-supported policies make up the core of the SAVE Act, sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and supported by former President Donald Trump and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.).
The issue takes on added salience, as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that, if a fraction of illegal immigrants turned out to vote, they could, change the course of the election in swing states and well beyond. “Mathematically, there are 12 states, plus the Nebraska 2nd congressional district, where the voting-age non-citizen population is larger in 2024 than the state winner’s margin of victory in the last presidential election,” found a new CIS report.
A relatively small turnout of illegal immigrants could change election results from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris in Georgia (4.5%) and Arizona (5.1%), the group found. They could even impact a seeming impenetrable bastion of Republican electoral votes such as Texas. If 54% of illegal immigrant residents in Texas turned out to vote, and two-thirds voted for Harris-Walz, it could tip the nation’s largest Republican state in favor of the Democratic ticket for the first presidential election since 1976. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has led state efforts to remove non-citizens from the voting rolls.
Although audits have found thousands of non-citizens were registered to vote — and had, in fact, cast a vote — in swing states, the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department has sued to prevent states from removing non-citizens from the voting rolls. The DOJ alleges election integrity measures in Virginia and Alabama violate the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day Quiet Period Provision, curtailing all such actions during the 90 days before an election.
Surging numbers of illegal border crossings have catapulted the issue of illegal immigration into the top three issues on voters’ minds ahead of the 2024 election. Before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, the largest number of illegal border crossings in American history took place in 1986, the last year Congress gave amnesty to illegal immigrants: 1,692,544 illegal crossings took place that year. All four years of the Biden-Harris administration have broken that record.
- 2,901,142 illegal border crossingsduring FY 2024
- 3,201,144 in FY 2023
- 2,766,582 in FY 2022
There were 1,965,519 illegal crossings during FY 2021 — 1,577,840 since February 2021, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris officially took office. However, many illegal immigrants began arriving before that date in anticipation of a Biden-Harris victory, some wearing campaign paraphernalia.
Some pro-life advocates intend to help secure the vote on election day and beyond. Students for Life Action is recruiting election integrity volunteers for the states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Election year irregularities may be confounded by another factor: Illegal immigrants also favor Donald Trump at slightly higher rates after four years of the Biden-Harris administration than in 2016. “[T]here is some evidence naturalized citizens may prefer Harris over Trump by roughly a 60 percent to 40 percent margin,” reports CIS. “If non-citizens had this voting preference it would require 7.48 percent of non-citizens in Georgia and 8.55 percent of non-citizens in Arizona to vote in 2024 for the net gain in support for Harris to exceed the margin of victory in the last presidential election.” That margin would require more than 90% of illegal immigrants to vote in order to paint Texas blue.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.