GOP crackdowns on noncitizen voting ensnare newly naturalized Americans

Esternita Watkins, 42, became an American citizen nearly two years ago, wearing a green dress and a big smile at her naturalization ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama.

She’d been living in the U.S. since 2015, when she arrived from the Philippines on a fiancée visa to marry Christopher Watkins, 54, now her husband, whom she’d met on Facebook.Soon after she earned citizenship, she registered to vote and was looking forward to casting her first ballot in this year’s presidential election. But she got a letter this month saying state Secretary of State Wes Allen had flagged her for having a noncitizen identification number and deactivated her voter registration.

To prove her citizenship and vote in November, the letter said, she would need fill out the voter registration form again.

“I was mad, because I worked so hard to be a U.S. citizen so I can vote,” Watkins said, adding that the naturalization process had been expensive.

She was uncomfortable with the letter — it felt like something political was going on, she said — and she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to register again.

With Republican officials around the country like Allen putting a fresh focus on preventing noncitizens from voting — which is already illegal and rare — it’s naturalized Americans like Esternita Watkins who will be most affected by such voter roll purges, voting rights advocates and attorneys say.

"Maybe the first time an election official tried doing this, you could say, OK, they didn't really think it through," said Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights group in Washington, D.C. "But they keep doing the same thing, even though they know that every single time what happens is that thousands