After coming up<\/u> repeatedly during the Democratic mayoral primary, a bill to enfranchise noncitizens in New York City elections appears to be within close reach.<\/p>\n
Since 2005, activists in the city have been working to extend the right to vote in local elections to noncitizens. Though there were prior legislative attempts in 2009 and 2013, those efforts never commanded as much political momentum.<\/p>\n
But in June, the latest iteration of the bill<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0reintroduced last winter by New York City Council Member Ydanis Rodr\u00edguez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic \u2014 received its 34th co-sponsor, giving it a supermajority on the 51-member council. The legislation, while limited to permanent residents and those with work authorizations \u2014 meaning those with Temporary Protected Status or in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program \u2014 would enfranchise some 900,000 New Yorkers. If passed, the bill would offer a significant boon to a growing national movement around expanding ballot access to immigrants.<\/p>\n Under council rules, bills with supermajority support are guaranteed a public hearing within 60 days. No hearing is yet scheduled, but activists say they\u2019re working to get something on the calendar. \u201c60 days would put us around August 9, and typically the city council doesn\u2019t meet for hearings in July or August but the rules are the rules so we\u2019re in conversation with the Speaker [Corey Johnson\u2019s] office,\u201d said Paul Westrick, the manager of democracy policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, which is organizing for the bill. The legislative season ends in December, so activists plan to ramp up pressure over the next six months.<\/p>\n\n Advocates say they already have sizable public backing. One poll conducted this year by the left-leaning firm Change Research found 65 percent of respondents supported the measure. Another Change Research poll from last year found support among New Yorkers was higher when voters learned how many immigrants would be impacted by the bill. \u201cIt seems like less of a special privilege given to the few as opposed to a large group of people living in New York City,\u201d concluded the pollsters.<\/p>\n Westrick told The Intercept that they\u2019ve been reminding community members that New York City is a \u201cquintessential city of immigrants\u201d \u2014 many of whom have been \u201cquite literally risking their lives to keep the city running and healthy\u201d during the coronavirus pandemic \u2014 and that the bill would enfranchise nearly a million New Yorkers to vote. \u201cThat really helped people understand how many others were shut out of the voting process,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Across the U.S.,<\/u> political leaders are having renewed discussions about expanding \u2014 and in many cases, restricting \u2014 noncitizen voting.<\/p>\n The practice was once common at the local, state, and even federal levels. For the first 150 years of American history, white, male, property owners, regardless of citizenship status, were permitted to vote. As political scientist Ron Hayduk and anthropologist Kathleen Coll have documented<\/a> in the journal New Political Science, voting was used as a tactic to foster civic attachment among the new white Christian men who came to the country during the 17th and 18th centuries and to entice them to occupy Native lands.<\/p>\n But hostility toward foreigners increased during and after the War of 1812, and some states began to restrict noncitizen voting. Another wave of nativist sentiment preceded World War I, leading to even more states eliminating the practice. Arkansas became the final state to end noncitizen voting in 1926, though noncitizens weren\u2019t officially banned from voting in federal elections until 1996, when Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.<\/p>\n New York City was actually the first jurisdiction to bring the practice back. In 1968, as a concession during the city\u2019s fight over \u201ccommunity control\u201d of schools \u2014 a struggle to hold schools accountable by empowering parent representatives \u2014 New York granted noncitizens the right to vote in school board elections. Noncitizens voted in those contests until 2002, when the city switched to mayoral control and abolished its elected school board.<\/p>\n After New York City trailblazed on school board voting, Chicago followed suit about three decades later, and San Francisco in 2016. Ten cities in Maryland also allow noncitizen voting for elections including city council and mayor, and more recently voters in two Vermont cities \u2014 Montpelier and Winooski \u2014 approved measures to enfranchise any resident over 18. \u201cPeople always glom onto the idea that you have to earn our right to vote by becoming a citizen,\u201d Winooski\u2019s bill sponsor, state Rep. Hal Colson, told<\/a> Stateline. \u201cI just don\u2019t buy that. We\u2019re talking about a large chunk of the community that\u2019s closed off.\u201d<\/p>\n Other states have been actively pushing back against noncitizen voting. Four states \u2014 Colorado<\/a>, Florida<\/a>, North Dakota<\/a>, and Alabama<\/a> \u2014 passed ballot amendments in the last few years to clarify in their state constitutions that only U.S. citizens can vote. And in 2018, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.,\u00a0introduced a nonbinding resolution<\/a> in Congress condemning noncitizen voting, which passed with 279 votes in favor.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Councilmember Brianne Nadeau\u00a0recently reintroduced a bill<\/a> to extend voting rights to green card holders, a legislative effort that has failed four times over the last decade.<\/p>\n D.C. Council\u2019s bill currently lacks the kind of majority support among elected officials that the legislation in New York has. And the five-person Judiciary and Public Safety Committee that has jurisdiction to move it forward so far only has two co-sponsors \u2014 Charles Allen and Brooke Pinto \u2014 and needs a majority to advance. Of the remaining committee members, Mary Cheh declined to comment, and Vincent Gray and Anita Bonds did not return requests for comment.<\/p>\n Allen, the committee chair, told The Intercept he plans to hold a hearing on the issue and hopes that helps change the minds of his colleagues. \u201cWe have this thing in D.C. about taxation without representation,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be the first place to do it, and I think it\u2019s the right thing to do. And I don\u2019t think we have to have New York do it first.\u201d<\/p>\n In New York, the pro-enfranchisement faction has not just a veto-proof majority on the city council, but also support from the presumptive next mayor, Eric Adams, who would have power to veto. \u201cWe cannot be a beacon to the world and continue to attract the global talent, energy and entrepreneurship that has allowed our city to thrive for centuries if we do not give immigrants a vote in how this city is run and what our priorities are for the future,\u201d Adams told<\/a> New York Daily News in February.<\/p>\n In the meantime, activists will keep beating the voting reform drum. Hina Naveed, a 31-year-old registered nurse and recent law school graduate, is one of the hundreds of thousands who would receive the right to vote under Rodriguez\u2019s bill. As a DACA recipient, she has a permit to work legally in the country but has no pathway to citizenship.<\/p>\n This summer Naveed has been working as a campaign manager for a Staten Island borough president candidate, and as she\u2019s met with immigrant households, she\u2019s been educating them about the noncitizen voting bill. \u201cEvery single person was so excited,\u201d she told The Intercept. \u201cThe idea of being able to vote and have their voices heard was just so phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Noncitizens May Soon Be Eligible to Vote in New York City<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bill extending the right to vote to noncitizens has a supermajority in the city council \u2014 the latest push to revive the tradition across the U.S.<\/p>\n The post Noncitizens May Soon Be Eligible to Vote in New York City<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238016"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238682,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238016\/revisions\/238682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}