P resident Joe Biden’s leftist-activist allies are suing me, again. They want to open the gate to noncitizen voting. I’m not going to let them.

President Biden’s failure to address our border crisis signals a troubling new trend and campaign tactic from the Left: a push to open our elections to noncitizen voting. Despite attempts by activists to downplay this issue, leftist activists such as Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda persist in legal efforts to stop Georgia from verifying U.S. citizenship when people register to vote.

These tactics are not new. When Abrams was running for governor in 2018, she notably declared that a “blue wave” would sweep her into office. “That blue wave,” she said, “is undocumented,” while her allies concurrently pursued legal action to stop citizenship verification. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, these leftist groups have continued their push to dismantle the vital checks that Georgia uses to verify U.S. citizenship when someone registers to vote.

Currently, the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, the Stacey Abrams–founded New Georgia Project, and other left-wing groups are attempting to eliminate Georgia’s commonsense citizenship-verification process.

Georgia uses a particularly effective citizenship-verification process when people register to vote. Georgia has been REAL ID–compliant since 2012, which means that every person has to show documentary proof of their U.S. citizenship or legal-immigration status when they get a driver’s license or state identification card. And because more than 90 percent of voter registrations in Georgia come through the Georgia Department of Driver Services as a result of automatic voter registration, Georgia’s citizenship-verification process is quick and seamless. When documents show that the person attempting to register was not a U.S. citizen and that person has not attached a more recent document showing that they have become a U.S. citizen, they are not able to vote until they have proved their U.S. citizenship, which they can do even at the polls. This straightforward measure protects the right of eligible voters of all political persuasions to have their votes given the full weight they deserve.

Getting rid of citizenship verification would allow noncitizens to vote, plain and simple. Georgia’s citizenship-verification process has flagged thousands of people who provided documents to Driver Services showing that they were not citizens and whose citizenship status was still unable to be confirmed by the federal government after they attempted to register to vote. And Georgia does not rely just on state databases for this information. Georgia’s process also includes checking potential noncitizens against the online SAVE database maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If a person registering to vote is unable to be verified as a U.S. citizen through either of those checks, and they have not submitted one of the many eligible forms showing that they are a U.S. citizen, they are not able to vote until they have done so.

<p”>But this commonsense process to protect the right of U.S. citizens to decide U.S. elections is under attack by the Left. According to their very own complaint filed in court, the leftist activists suing me want my office “to place in active voter registration status all applicants who . . . failed to verify citizenship . . . so long as the applicant has sworn or affirmed he or she is a U.S. citizen.” They want me to ignore the documents from DDS and USCIS that show the person may not be a U.S. citizen and just take their word for it! That is a recipe to have noncitizens voting in our elections. Georgia’s existing process simply asks those people who previously provided documentary proof that they were not a citizen and who are unable to be verified by SAVE to show proof of citizenship before voting. It’s a logical approach that has been working well, and there is no need to get rid of it right before a major election, no matter how much the Left thinks that potentially having noncitizens vote will help their preferred candidate.

Let me be clear: U.S. elections should be decided by U.S. citizens and only U.S. citizens.

Secure elections mean that only U.S. citizens are voting in our elections and that foreign actors are shut out from voting, participating in, and funding elections and campaigns.

That is why since 2018 I have called the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment to ensure that noncitizens are never allowed to vote in Georgia. Leftist activists have already shown that they want to change the laws that require voters to be U.S. citizens. A constitutional amendment would eliminate any possibility for future efforts to change those laws.

I have worked with Georgia state senator Rick Williams and state representative Jesse Petrea to ban foreign funding in elections and campaigns and to require lobbyists of foreign entities to register with a newly created state registry, and I am pleased that both the constitutional amendment and the ban on foreign funding of elections passed the state senate with wide support.

This is the simple and incontrovertible point: American elections should be decided by American citizens. We must remain steadfast in our commitment to the democratic values that have defined our nation for more than two centuries. The protection of our electoral process is not a partisan issue; it is a civic responsibility that transcends political partisanship. Republicans and patriotic Democrats must work to preserve the integrity of our elections and maintain the trust of the American people in the democratic system that makes America great, and that includes supporting thorough citizenship verification like we do in Georgia.