Welcome to the Wednesday, May 21, 2025, Brew.
By: Lara Bonatesta
Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:
- Texas legislators put citizen voting requirement on 2025 ballot after blocking it in 2023
- Join Ballotpedia Society!
- On the Ballot answers what’s in the federal budget and where we are now in the budget reconciliation process
Texas legislators put citizen voting requirement on 2025 ballot after blocking it in 2023
On Nov. 4, Texas voters will decide on a constitutional amendment that would add noncitizens to the list of people who cannot vote in the state.
Currently, Article 6, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution states that the following groups of people cannot vote:
- “Persons under 18 years of age
- “Persons who have been determined mentally incompetent by a court, subject to such exceptions as the Legislature may make
- “Persons convicted of any felony, subject to such exceptions as the Legislature may make.”
The proposed amendment would add “persons who are not citizens of the United States” to the list.
In Texas, a two-thirds supermajority vote in each chamber is required to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot. This equals 100 votes in the House and 21 in the Senate, assuming no vacancies. The Republican party controls both chambers but needed 12 Democrats to join them in the House and one Democrat in the Senate to meet the threshold.
On April 1, the Senate voted 28-3 to pass Senate Joint Resolution 37, with all 20 Republicans and eight Democrats voting in favor and three Democrats voting against.
On May 12, the House voted 102-14 to pass SJR 37, putting the amendment on the 2025 ballot. Fifteen House Democrats and 87 Republicans voted yes, and 14 Democrats voted no. There were 22 members present who did not vote and 12 who were absent.
During the 2023 legislative session, the Senate voted 29-1 to approve Senate Joint Resolution 35, which proposed adding the same language to the state constitution.
The resolution fell 12 votes short in the House, which voted 88-0 in favor, with 54 members present and not voting and seven absent. Six Democrats joined the Republican majority in supporting the amendment. The resolution needed 100 votes to be adopted.
Below is a map showing districts where legislators did not vote in 2023 and then voted yes in 2025.
One Republican who was absent for the vote in 2023 voted “yes” in 2025 – Dade Phelan. Phelan was Speaker of the House in 2023. In December 2024, he announced that he would not run for re-election as speaker in 2025. According to the Texas Tribune, Phelan’s announcement ended “a bruising, monthslong intraparty push to remove him from power.” Click here to learn learn more about the 2025 Texas House speaker election.
Two other Republican House members – Craig Goldman and Andrew Murr– either did not vote or were absent in the 2023 vote. In 2024, Goldman was elected to the U.S. House, and Murr did not run for re-election.
In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed a law prohibiting noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Federal law did not address state or local elections. Currently, the District of Columbia and municipalities in three states allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. To see the status of noncitizen voting in each state, click here.
Since 2020, 16 state legislatures have placed constitutional amendments on the ballot to require voters to be U.S. citizens in order to vote in state and local elections. An average of 99.7% of Republican legislators supported the amendments.
In all but one state—South Dakota —every Republican legislator voted in favor. In South Dakota, 95.3% of Republicans supported the amendment. Democratic support varied between states, averaging 43.1% and ranging from a low 0% in Missouri (2024), Oklahoma (2024), and Wisconsin (2024) to 100% in Alabama (2020) and Iowa (2024).
Between 1894 and 2024, voters in 19 states considered 22 measures related to citizenship requirements for voting. All were approved. Click here to see a list of those measures.
In 2026, voters in Arkansas, Kansas, and South Dakota will decide on similar amendments.
The chart below shows the legislative support by state for citizenship voting requirement amendments.
Click here to learn more about the 2025 amendment in Texas.
Join Ballotpedia Society!
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On the Ballot answers what’s in the federal budget and where we are now in the budget reconciliation process
In this week’s new episode of On The Ballot, host Norm Leahy and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Michael Thorning discuss the latest developments in the ongoing budget reconciliation process and take a look at what is in the proposed federal budget.
This episode is a follow-up to our Jan. 24 episode, when we broke down what budget reconciliation is, how it works, and looked at its use in recent years. Click here to listen to that episode.
We’ve also been covering budget reconciliation in the Daily Brew since the start of President Donald Trump’s (R) second term in January. To see that coverage, check out the following editions of the Brew:
To learn more about budget reconciliation, watch our March 7 video, or click here.
Subscribe to On the Ballot on YouTube or your preferred podcast app, or click here to listen.