There are special moments in life that remind me why I’m glad and proud to be an American and why this country is worth fighting for. I experienced one of those moments a couple of weeks ago when I had the privilege and honor of attending a naturalization ceremony.
If you’ve never been, I highly recommend adding this to your bucket list. If you read social media cynicism and listen to campus rhetoric, you might believe America is irredeemably unjust, but sitting in a federal courtroom with people beaming with pride as they become United States citizens is a mighty powerful antidote to that negativity.
As the ceremony began, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official called each applicant by their name. One by one, each applicant stood up, many with tears in their eyes and pride on their faces.
You could literally feel the joy and gratitude permeate the courtroom. These weren’t individuals protesting our country or tearing down our history; they were instead embracing it and eagerly entering the American experiment.
Finally came the oath of allegiance. As 48 new citizens from 31 countries swore loyalty to the United States, I could feel myself getting emotional as tears welled up in my eyes. A quartet sang America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner.
Those familiar songs that I’ve sung since childhood hit me a little deeper, as I realized I was in a room full of new citizens who truly understand what freedom means, because so many of them came from countries where freedom didn’t exist.
As the ceremony ended and we headed out of the courtroom, the new citizens were encouraged to register to vote. And to my chagrin, the supposedly non-partisan League of Women Voters was there registering these new voters.
If you only know of the League through its misleading branding, you might think it is just a civic-minded organization supporting voter engagement. But as president emeritus of Americans for Citizen Voting, an organization that works on election integrity, I know that the League of Women Voters is anything but “non-partisan.”
This is the same organization that last year opposed ACV’s constitutional amendment efforts in eight states to ban non-citizens from voting in their local and state elections. The league fought us in nearly all those efforts. In fact, the League of Women Voters in Vermont openly states it supports non-citizens voting in municipal elections!
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The irony at a ceremony designed to celebrate the importance and privilege of citizenship, the group registering new voters also advocates for giving non-citizens the right to vote.
When I worked for the St. Louis County Board of Elections, voter registration was always conducted by a bipartisan team of one Democrat and one Republican. The idea is that transparency fosters trust and fairness, which in turn protects the process. There should never be a question of whether one side is exploiting a captive audience to gain a political advantage. Bipartisanship should be the norm at naturalization ceremonies
The League of Women Voters has every right to advocate for whatever policies it chooses. It should not be granted privileged access to brand new citizens under a false facade of neutrality. If these naturalization ceremonies are to include voter registration, then they should be conducted in a manner that is truly bipartisan and free from both unintended and intended influences.
Citizenship and the right to vote mean something. If we want new Americans to appreciate both of these values, we must model integrity, not the political opportunism that the League of Women Voters represents
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