Gov. McKee Signs H7434/S3339, Barring ICE Agents Within 200 Feet of Rhode Island Polling Places

The Rhode Island House passed the final version of H7434 58-13 on June 10, 2026, and the Senate passed its companion, S3339, 31-7 on June 11. Governor Dan McKee (D) signed the bills into law June 22, 2026 — independently confirmed by Ballotpedia’s mid-year legislative tracker (“McKee signed the bills on June 22, making Rhode Island one of six states so far this year to enact legislation prohibiting or restricting law enforcement presence near election-related sites”) and by its companion state-by-state page. McKee separately held a public ceremonial signing event July 24, 2026 at the Dorcas International Institute in Providence — a publicity event, not the legal enactment date, which is June 22. The bill adds a new section, R.I. Gen. Laws §17-19-55, “Voting interference,” to Title 17, Chapter 19 (“Conduct of Election and Voting Equipment, and Supplies”). The introduced text (LC004030, fetched directly from rilegislature.gov) reads verbatim:

“17-19-55. Voting interference. No federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, agents or officials shall be permitted within two hundred feet (200’) of any polling place at which voting is being conducted.”

Secondary reporting on the final enacted version (Ballotpedia’s mid-year report, Providence Journal) describes an additional “except when they are present to vote in compliance with the law” exception for ICE agents who are themselves voters — a carve-out that does not appear in the introduced LC004030 text quoted above, and that this entry has not independently verified against an enrolled/chaptered bill text; flagged as a sourcing gap, not asserted as confirmed statutory language.

Rhode Island’s statute is narrower by its own text than the other three enacted 2026-cycle state laws in this family: it names only ICE (“No federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, agents or officials”), not FBI, CBP, DHS more broadly, or U.S. Marshals, unlike California’s “officer or agent of a federal law enforcement agency” (2026-09-19–newsom-signs-sb884-protect-our-polls-act-arrest-restriction), Connecticut’s “authorized by the federal government” (2026-05-15–connecticut-public-act-26-42-sec57-250ft-federal-agent-buffer-polling-sites), or New Mexico’s “civil, military or naval service of the United States” formula (2026-03-09–lujan-grisham-signs-sb264-bars-troops-ice-new-mexico-polling-places). Its enforcement mechanism is also thinner: §17-19-55 sits outside Title 17’s election-crimes chapter (Chapter 23), and this entry’s research — including a direct fetch of the introduced bill text — found no self-contained penalty clause in the operative section; a related source-note on this statutory map additionally found that the Rhode Island Board of Elections’ own August 19, 2026 directive to local canvassing authorities treats §17-19-55 as operational guidance (identify the person, confirm agency, and if they won’t leave, contact the Board or local police) rather than citing a specific criminal penalty, suggesting enforcement may run through administrative/Board of Elections channels rather than as a self-executing criminal statute. This entry was unable to independently confirm or rule out a cross-reference elsewhere in Rhode Island law attaching a criminal penalty to a §17-19-55 violation specifically; that remains an open gap, not a verified absence, since the search for it was not exhaustive of RI’s full statutory cross-reference structure. A specific Public Law chapter number for H7434/S3339 was not located in this pass (RI’s online Public Laws index is organized as static index pages rather than a searchable database usable by this agent); unfindable within this session’s access, not asserted to be nonexistent.