Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas can no longer demand proof of citizenship from would-be voters

Voters in North Carolina
(Image credit: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

Would-be voters in Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas cannot be required to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, a federal court of appeals ruled Friday night.

The 2-1 decision struck down a lower court's ruling in favor of the laws and ordered all voter applications submitted since January 29 to be treated as if proof of citizenship were not a stated requirement. The rule was previously enforced only in Kansas, where it is estimated to have kept at least 20,000 people from registering to vote.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.