Voting on the ‘honor system’ is madness

Every new client who opens an account at my firm hands over a driver’s license, a passport, or a certified trust document before a single dollar moves. Federal regulators call it Know Your Customer or KYC for short. I call it common sense: verify who someone is before you give them access to something valuable. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will decide whether Arizona can apply that same principle to the ballot box, with a ruling likely by next June, and the case deserves more attention than it’s getting.The case is Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, and the question is narrower than it sounds. Nobody involved is arguing that noncitizens should vote. Federal law already bars that. The real fight is whether Arizona can ask someone registering with the state’s own form to back up a citizenship claim with a document, rather than simply take their word for it under penalty of perjury. (The court granted certiorari at the end of June. Merits briefing runs through mid-October, with arguments expected later this term and a decision by the end of the court’s term next summer.)Arizona has been here before. A 2004 ballot initiative required documentary proof of citizenship to register, and the Supreme Court trimmed that requirement in 2013. In Arizona v. Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona, the justices ruled 7-2 that Arizona couldn’t demand extra paperwork from applicants using the federal registration form, because federal law requires states to “accept and use” that form as sufficient. Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the court called Congress’s power over the mechanics of federal elections “paramount.” Arizona lost, but the court left a door open: nothing stopped the state from requiring proof on its own state-specific form. Arizona walked through that door, and then the fight came. The state’s current law lets an applicant who attests to citizenship but skips the documents register as a federal-only voter, someone who can vote for president and Congress but not for state or local office. Voting-rights groups sued anyway, arguing that a documentary requirement chills eligible citizens, particularly naturalized citizens, military families, and students who don’t have a birth certificate handy. A federal district court and a divided Ninth Circuit agreed, blocking several provisions, including one that let Arizona check its rolls for noncitizens within 90 days of a federal election.Here’s my first supporting point, and it’s a matter of constitutional text, not preference. Article I gives states the authority to set voter qualifications for their own legislature and applies those same qualifications to elections for the House. Citizenship is one of those qualifications. The power to define a qualification carries the power to confirm it. A state that requires citizenship has to be able to ask for evidence of it, or the qualification is nothing but a sentence in a statute book that nobody enforces.Here’s my second point, and it comes straight from 30 years of watching people sign forms. An attestation under penalty of perjury sounds serious until you ask how often anyone gets prosecuted for lying on it. The honest answer is almost never. If someone’s already willing to break federal law by voting as a noncitizen, a perjury charge nobody files isn’t much of a deterrent. Checking a box isn’t verification. It’s an honor system, and honor systems work fine for expense reports and fall apart the moment real stakes show up.My third point is structural, and it’s the one that should worry anyone who cares about how the rolls actually get maintained, not just who’s on them today. The lower courts didn’t strike down Arizona’s law because judges hate accountability. They struck it down because the 2013 ruling treats federal preemption in this area as a one-way ratchet: Any state addition to the federal form is a conflict, full stop, regardless of whether it actually displaces anything. That same reasoning is what produced the 90-day quiet-period rule, which tells Arizona it can’t clean noncitizens off its voter rolls in the weeks before the exact election when the rolls matter most. A rule built to stop last-minute partisan mischief now stops routine list maintenance, too.FLORIDA MAN VOTED FOR 20 YEARS UNDER A STOLEN NAME. STILL THINK SAVE AMERICA ACT IS PARANOIA?Concerns about eligible citizens getting caught in the paperwork are real, not a talking point invented for this fight. Naturalized citizens don’t always carry their certificates around, and a young person who just moved for college may not have a birth certificate within reach. But Arizona’s own law already answers that problem. Anyone who attests but can’t immediately document citizenship still registers and still votes in federal races while the state sorts out the rest. The safety valve exists. The question before the Court isn’t whether Arizona can lock anyone out. It’s whether Arizona can ask a question at all.The Supreme Court doesn’t need to overturn the Inter-Tribal Council to get this right. It needs to clarify that the elections clause gives Congress power over how federal elections are run, not a blank check to strip states of every tool for confirming who’s allowed to run them. A state that verifies citizenship isn’t defying federal election law. It’s doing the one thing every institution that handles something valuable is expected to do: Check the ID before you hand over the keys.Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.