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Early voting is open, and hundreds of thousands across Wisconsin have already cast a ballot. As presidential candidates rain down on Wisconsin in the lead-up to Election Day next Tuesday, we take a look at an item on your ballot: another constitutional amendment.

The referendum was authored and placed on the ballot by the Wisconsin Legislature. It would change a word in the Wisconsin constitution, flipping every to only US citizens allowed to cast a ballot. If approved by a simple majority of voters next Tuesday, the amendment would prevent municipalities from permitting people who are noncitizens from voting in local elections.

No municipality in Wisconsin currently allows noncitizens to vote. And people without citizenship are federally prohibited from voting in federal elections, like for President or Congress, by a sweeping 1996 law. A handful of municipalities in just three states permit people without citizenship to vote in local elections. So, too, in Washington DC, which in 2022 approved the measure.

But — should the right to vote in local elections be expanded? How does this measure in our nation’s long history of expanding suffrage? How does this ballot measure tie into false claims of illegal voting and anti-immigrant rhetoric during this presidential year?

“The struggle to expand democracy has always been a political fight,” says one of our guests, journalist John Nichols.

Wisconsin is one of eight states this November with the same ballot measure. UW-Madison professor Benjamin Márquez says in those states — which include  Kentucky, Idaho, South Carolina, Missouri, Oklahoma, North Carolina and South Carolina— he expects voter approval to be “a clean sweep.” 

About the guests: 

John Nichols is associate editor at The Capital Times, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, and author of more than a dozen books, including It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (co-authored with Senator Bernie Sanders). You can follow him on X at @nicholsuprising.

Benjamin Márquez is Professor of Political Science and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at UW-Madison, where he teaches and researches on Latino and American politics and Mexican American social movement organizations. He’s the author of many publications, including a comprehensive political history of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). 

Professor Márquez mentions a book during the interview, he’s referring The Right to Vote (2000) by Alexander Keyssar.

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