Last week, a survey arrived in the mail from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s organization, Integrity Works for Georgia Action, Inc. It was one more effort to drum up support for what’s become Raffensperger’s signature pursuit: A constitutional amendment banning non-citizens from voting.

On the face of it, the secretary of state seems to have the right philosophy: The right to vote is a fundamental function of citizenship in a republic. If a non-citizen can perform the fundamental functions of a citizen, then what exactly is the difference between the two?

But this also seems like a solution in search of a problem.

Federal law prevents non-citizens voting in federal elections (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996).

Georgia law prevents them from voting in state or local elections (Official Code of Georgia § 21-2-216).

Based on information from Ballotpedia.com, no state allows non-citizens to vote in state elections — but some do allow cities to set their own rules for municipal voting and some of those cities have allowed non-citizens to cast ballots in their elections.

Georgia does not allow cities to set election rules on their own; at the least, the Legislature must approve local legislation. For example, elections for some county boards of education are partisan, with Republican and Democratic party primaries in the spring followed by a general election in November; others are nonpartisan, with a single election determining the winner. Local officials can ask the Legislature to change the election from one format to the other, and the Legislature decides whether to do so. But local legislation can’t overcome the state law that says only citizens can vote in state and local elections.

Of the cities that have enacted non-citizen voting, some have faced court challenges — and most of those court challenges have been successful.

In December 2021, New York City’s city council extended the right to vote in municipal elections to non-citizens legally living in the city, according to Ballotpedia.com. It became law the following January and made New York the biggest city in America that let non-citizens vote.

But a year after the law took effect, opponents filed suit against it, and on June 27, 2022, the New York State Supreme Court for Staten Island overturned it, ruling that the law violated the state’s constitution. On Feb. 21 of this year, the appellate court upheld that ruling.

The situation was not much different in San Francisco, where voters approved a change to the city charter that would allow non-citizens whose children were in the city school system to vote for members of the city board of education. Voters approved the change in 2016, it took effect in 2018, but in 2022 San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard B. Ulmer Jr. ruled that the law violated the California Constitution.

To be sure, not every court case has gone that way. The D.C. Noncitizen Vote Act, which allowed non-citizens to vote in Washington, D.C., elections, first had to get past bipartisan opposition in the U.S. House of Representatives, then was met with a court challenge. The U.S. District Court dismissed that challenge, though, stating that the plaintiffs’ votes would not be diluted by allowing non-citizens to vote.

Georgia law is clear: Only citizens can vote.

Georgia politics is clear: Legislators are not going to change the law to allow non-citizens to vote.

Court rulings are not quite as clear, but they lean strongly against allowing non-citizens to vote — even in states known for being far more liberal than Georgia.

Any attempt to allow non-citizens to vote in Georgia will fail, even without the proposed constitutional amendment.