Recently, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman announced that he had joined 25 other attorneys general in a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to protect states’ ability to require proof of citizenship to vote and to remove noncitizens from voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
I appreciate our AG’s effort, but I am a little disappointed we have reached this point, given that it is already the law that you have to be a citizen to vote in state or federal elections. It is unfortunate that some courts are trying to undermine those laws.
While I was still in the Kentucky General Assembly, I remember sitting on the Elections Committee as Secretary of State Elaine Walker came to testify before our committee. It is still burned into my memory that when I held up a Kentucky voter registration form and pointed to the requirement that someone registering to vote must attest that they are a United States citizen, I asked the question, “How do we know that they are telling the truth,” and the response provided to me was, “We just trust them.”
Now you can imagine that I didn’t really take that answer well given that the right to vote is an important right and responsibility and should not be taken lightly. I am more of a Reagan, “Trust but verify,” type of guy.
Another incident that troubled me was when my son-in-law, who is from Syria and here legally (it took us about $20,000 and two years to get him out of Ghana legally), went to get his driver’s license before he had become a citizen. They tried to sign him up to vote because of the Motor Voter Act. Thankfully, my daughter was there and explained that he was not yet a citizen, so he could not register.
I don’t blame the clerk, but there does need to be better safeguards in place, such as having a person’s citizenship status on their driver’s license. This would be similar to what was presented in HB70 in the 2026 KY Legislative Session by Representative Hodgson and Representative Roberts. This way, this same mistake would hopefully be avoided in the future.
Had my son-in-law accidentally signed up to vote when he wasn’t a citizen or, even worse, had signed a document prepared by someone else claiming that he was a citizen, the chances of him ever becoming a citizen would drop dramatically.
Thankfully, my daughter was there, and my son-in-law has since that time become a citizen of the U.S.—something he cherishes. And he has since registered to vote and proudly cast his votes in several elections.
If someone who wasn’t born in the U.S. takes pride in voting and sees it as a responsibility, especially since he truly knows what a real dictator is, then we who were blessed to be here from day one should never take that right for granted.
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