noncitizen

PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s elections in recent years have been relatively free of problems, and verified cases of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.

That’s not stopping Republicans from pushing for major changes in the way the state conducts its voting.

Maine is one of two states with election-related initiatives on the Nov. 4 ballot but is putting the most far-reaching measure before voters. In Texas, Republicans are asking voters to make clear in the state constitution that people who are not U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote.

Maine’s Question 1 centers on requiring voter ID, but is more sweeping in nature. The initiative, which has the backing of an influential conservative group in the state, also would limit the use of drop boxes to just one per municipality and create restrictions for absentee voting even as the practice has been growing in popularity.

Voters in both states will decide on the measures at a time when President Trump continues to lie about widespread fraud leading to his loss in the 2020 presidential election and make unsubstantiated claims about future election-rigging, a strategy that has become routine during election years. Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have been pushing for proof of citizenship requirements to register and vote, but with only limited success.

Maine’s initiative would impose voter ID, restrict absentee voting

The Maine proposal seeks to require voters to produce a voter ID before casting a ballot, a provision that has been adopted in several other states, mostly those controlled by Republicans. In April, Wisconsin voters enshrined that state’s existing voter ID law into the state’s constitution.

Question 1 also would eliminate two days of absentee voting, prohibit requests for absentee ballots by phone or family members, end absentee voter status for seniors and people with disabilities, and limit the number of drop boxes, among other changes.

Absentee voting is popular in Maine, where Democrats control the Legislature and governor’s office and voters have elected a Republican and an independent as U.S. senators. Nearly half of voters there used absentee voting in the 2024 presidential election.

Gov. Janet Mills is one of many Democrats in the state speaking out against the proposed changes.

“Whether you vote in person or by absentee ballot, you can trust that your vote will be counted fairly,” Mills said. “But that fundamental right to vote is under attack from Question 1.”

Proponents of the voter ID push said it’s about shoring up election security.

“There’s been a lot of noise about what it would supposedly do, but here’s the simple truth: Question 1 is about securing Maine’s elections,” said Republican Rep. Laurel Libby, a proponent of the measure.

A key supporter of the ballot initiative is Dinner Table PAC, a conservative group in the state. Dinner Table launched Voter ID for ME, which has raised more than $600,000 to promote the initiative. The bulk of that money has come from the Republican State Leadership Committee, which advocates for Republican candidates and initiatives at the state level through the country. Save Maine Absentee Voting, a state group that opposes the initiative, has raised more than $1.6 million, with the National Education Assn. as its top donor.

The campaigning for and against the initiative is playing out as the state and FBI are investigating how dozens of unmarked ballots meant to be used in this year’s election arrived inside a woman’s Amazon order. The secretary of state’s office says the blank ballots, still bundled and wrapped in plastic, will not be used in the election.

Texas voters consider a citizenship requirement

In Texas, voters are deciding whether to add wording to the state constitution that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and other backers said would guarantee that noncitizens will not be able to vote in elections there. State and federal laws already make it illegal for noncitizens to vote.

Thirteen states have made similar changes to their constitutions since North Dakota first did in 2018. Proposed constitutional amendments are on the November 2026 ballot in Kansas and South Dakota.

The measures have so far proven popular, winning approval with an average of 72% of the vote.

“I think it needs to sweep the nation,” said Republican state Rep. A.J. Louderback, who represents a district southwest of Houston. “I think we need to clean this mess up.”

Voters already have to attest they are U.S. citizens when they register, and voting by noncitizens, which is rare, is punishable as a felony and can lead to deportation.

Louderback and other supporters of such amendments point to policies in at least 20 communities across the country that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, though none are in Texas. They include Oakland and San Francisco, where noncitizens can cast ballots in school board races if they have children in the public schools, the District of Columbia, and several towns in Maryland and Vermont.

Other states, including Kansas, have wording in their constitutions putting a citizenship requirement in affirmative terms: Any U.S. citizen over 18 is eligible to vote. In some states, amendments have rewritten the language to make it more of a prohibition: Only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote.

The article on voting in the Texas Constitution currently begins with a list of three “classes of persons not allowed to vote”: people under 18, convicted felons and those “who have been determined mentally incompetent by a court.” The Nov. 4 amendment would add a fourth, “persons who are not citizens of the United States.”

Critics say the proposed changes are unnecessary

Critics say the Maine voter ID requirement and Texas noncitizen prohibition are solutions in search of a problem and promote a longstanding conservative GOP narrative that noncitizen voting is a significant problem, when in fact it’s exceedingly rare.

In Texas, the secretary of state’s office recently announced it had found the names of 2,700 “potential noncitizens” on its registration rolls out of the state’s nearly 18.5 million registered voters.

Veronikah Warms, staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said pushing the narrative encourages discrimination and stokes fear of state retaliation among naturalized citizens and people of color. Her group works to protect the rights of those groups and immigrants and opposes the proposed amendment.

“It just doesn’t serve any purpose besides furthering the lie that noncitizens are trying to subvert our democratic process,” she said. “This is just furthering a harmful narrative that will make it scarier for people to actually exercise their constitutional right.”

In Maine, approval of Question 1 would most likely make voting more difficult overall, said Mark Brewer, chair of the University of Maine political science department. He added that claims of widespread voter fraud are unsupported by evidence.

“The data show that the more hoops and restrictions you put on voting, the harder it is to vote and the fewer people will vote,” he said.

Whittle and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Sunday that he’s about to make good on a threat to revoke millions in federal funds for California because he says the state is illegally issuing commercial driver’s licenses to noncitizens.

In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” Duffy said California Gov. Gavin Newsom has refused to comply with U.S. Department of Transportation rules that require the state to stop issuing such licenses and review those already issued.

“So, one, I’m about to pull $160 million from California,” Duffy said. “And, as we pull more money, we also have the option of pulling California’s ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses.”

Newsom’s press office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the matter Sunday, but California has defended its practices previously. When Duffy threatened to revoke funds last month, a spokesperson for the governor dismissed the attack and noted that commercial license holders from California have a significantly lower rate of crashes than the national average and the Texas average, which is the only state with more licensed commercial drivers.

Last month, the Transportation Department tightened commercial driver’s license requirements for noncitizens after three fatal crashes that officials said were caused by immigrant truck drivers. Only three specific classes of visa holders will be eligible for CDLs under the new rules and states must verify an applicant’s immigration status in a federal database. The licenses will be valid for up to one year unless the applicant’s visa expires sooner.

Duffy said last month that California should never have issued 25% of 145 licenses investigators reviewed. He cited four California licenses that remained valid after the driver’s work permit expired — sometimes years after. The state had 30 days to come up with a plan to comply or lose funding.

A nationwide commercial driver’s license audit began after officials say a driver in the country illegally made a U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people. The audit found licenses that were issued improperly in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Washington.

Duffy said Sunday that California has unlawfully issued tens of thousands of these licenses to noncitizens.

“So you have 60,000 people on the roads who shouldn’t have licenses,” Duffy said. “They’re driving fuel tankers, they’re driving school buses, and we have seen some of the crashes on American roadways that come from these people who shouldn’t have these licenses.”

Duffy said earlier this month that he would withhold $40 million from California because it is the only state that is failing to enforce English language requirements for truckers. California defended its practices in a formal response to the Transportation Department, but federal officials were not satisfied.

The investigation launched after the Florida crash found what Duffy called significant failures in the way California is enforcing rules that took effect in June after one of President Trump’s executive orders. California had issued the driver a commercial license, but these English rules predate the crash.

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday asked California counties to provide it with lists of all inmates in their jails who are not American citizens, as well as the crimes they have been accused or convicted of and their scheduled release dates.

The Justice Department said in a statement that its “data requests” to the counties — including Los Angeles and San Francisco counties — were “designed to assist federal immigration authorities in prioritizing the removal of illegal aliens who committed crimes after illegally entering the United States.”

The requests add another layer to the Trump administration’s already roiling turf war with California over immigration policy and state and local sanctuary laws. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been swarming the region making thousands of arrests as part of President Trump’s call for mass deportations, and the Justice Department is already suing the city of Los Angeles over its sanctuary policy.

State officials have long defended California’s sanctuary policies, which generally forbid local authorities from enforcing civil immigration laws but provide for exceptions in cases involving criminal offenses. They have also criticized the administration and ICE agents for their recent arrest tactics in Southern California, including by citing figures that show that a majority of those arrested had no criminal convictions.

What immediate impact the demands would have — and whether they would spark a legal challenge from the state or counties — was not immediately clear. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recently resumed transferring some jail inmates to ICE for the first time in years, citing criminal exceptions to state and local sanctuary laws.

A spokesperson for L.A. County referred questions about the request to the Sheriff’s Department.

Asked about the request during a Civilian Oversight Commission meeting Thursday morning, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said information about all county inmates is already publicly available on the department’s website.

“The minute you get booked, processed and you get Livescanned, that’s a national system, so agents of the federal government will know you’re in custody,” he said. “So it’s not that we’re notifying them, it’s an automatic notification based on your fingerprints.”

The Justice Department said that it hoped the counties would voluntarily comply with its requests. But if they do not, it said, it would “pursue all available means of obtaining the data, including through subpoenas or other compulsory process.”

It said that while “every illegal alien by definition violates federal law, those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation’s safety and security.”

Not every noncitizen in the U.S. is in the country illegally, given that there are non-citizen permanent residents and other visa holders. However, as part of its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has given heightened scrutiny to people in those categories, as well.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, in her own statement about the requests, said that removing “criminal illegal aliens” from the country was the administration’s “highest priority.”

“I look forward to cooperating with California’s county sheriffs to accomplish our shared duty of keeping Californians and all Americans safe and secure,” Bondi said.

In May, Luna’s department transferred inmates from its jails to ICE for the first time since early 2020. Between May and June, the department handed 20 inmates over to the federal agency.

At Thursday’s oversight meeting, Luna said the department received 995 civil detainer requests from ICE in 2024, and that it did not comply with any of them, which it is not legally required to do. But he said that the department had to turn over the 20 inmates because it received federal judicial warrants from federal authorities for each of them.

He said he expected such warrants to increase, which would increase the number of inmates turned over.

“Those are legal documents signed by a judge. We cannot deny those,” he said.

Max Huntsman, the county’s inspector general, and other experts have said the Sheriff’s Department is required by federal and state law to comply with the warrants, and the process is legal under state and local sanctuary policies.

Times staff writers Rebecca Ellis and Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.