One of the criticisms Iowa’s secretary of state, Matt Schultz, has received throughout his effort to eject noncitizens who legally cannot and ethically should not vote in American elections is that his is a partisan effort to keep Latinos and Democrats from voting. Unfortunately those criticisms (most lately reified in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and the League of United Latin American Citizens) are somewhat valid.

Most recently, Iowa Senate President Jack Kibbie, D-Emmetsburg, stated in a news release he was “very disappointed with Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s handling of the most important duty of his office: ensuring the right of Iowans to vote.”

Kibbie is absolutely right. It is without question the duty of the secretary of state to ensure the right of Iowans to vote. Part of that duty is ensuring non-Iowans do not vote and thereby infringe on the rights of actual American citizens. 

For many years the simple matter of keeping noneligible voters off the voting rolls and out of polling booths has been a partisan issue. Of course, then, this most recent attempt at upholding the rule of law is criticized as an exercise in partisan hackery. It should not be.

This is the year 2012. The world is not as small, trustworthy a place as many of us remember or like to think, and in matters of state, we should take the utmost precautions so that noncitizens are not making decisions for those of us who are citizens. Voting is something so basic to our political existence, both as individuals and as a country, that we ought to be able to come to a broad-based consensus on it.

For many of the more than 130 million Americans who will probably vote in November, voting is their only chance at making an impact on the public world of politics. For the United States as a country, voting is what decides who will make laws and carry them out for the next two to six years. Without voting, many Americans would have no vestige of public life nor would the United States exist.

The necessity of voting to so many of us, on multiple levels, is exactly why only citizens should be allowed to vote. The same way policing and law enforcement depend upon officers making patrols and working their beats, maintaining the laws that govern formal civic participation require positive effort rather than mere trust in the intrinsic goodness of people. To that end, Secretary of State Schultz at the end of July issued new rules that would compare lists of registered voters to lists of foreign nationals living in Iowa.

Although he was probably wrong to do so by waiving normal procedures and making the rules under emergency provisions, he was right to do so.

But citizenship requirements for voting ensure that everyone acting upon the American political scene embraces certain common standards, or a common denominator, of what it means to be American and knows basic things about how our system works.

For those of us who become citizens by being born and growing up here in the families of our American parents, that understanding is obtained through civics and social studies classes in elementary, middle, and high school. We graduate the 12th grade — or should — knowing how the president is elected, some of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, what the Supreme Court’s role is and how laws are made. For those Americans who become citizens through the naturalization process, the civics test requires citizens-to-be to study and know about principles of American democracy, the system of government, our rights and responsibilities, and American history from colonial days to more recent times.

The absence of such a consensus would be dangerous. The perils of allowing people with no understanding of how the U.S. government gets things done or its values are as self-evident as they are numerous. We will never all agree on what should be the priorities of Congress and the presidency (national security, education, economic growth and jobs, immigration, etc.), nor will we agree on what policies we should enact regarding those issues.

What we can agree on is how the system works. We can agree on the rules that govern how the game of politics is played. One of those rules is that voting and citizenship are serious business. They are at least as serious as the purchase of tobacco, alcohol, and firearms; obtaining a passport; applying for loans and withdrawing money from bank accounts; and obtaining licenses to hunt and fish.

We require identification for all those comparatively small matters; why would we not verify the citizenship status of every voter?