The City of New York is preparing to approve a measure that would allow the city’s 800,000 legal residents who are noncitizens to vote in local elections. The proposal is expected to be approved on December 9 by a veto-proof majority of the City Council. If approved, it will be over the opposition of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who argues that giving the voting privilege to noncitizens would dissuade them from seeking naturalization.
According to the NY Times, the law will make NYC the largest municipality in the country to allow noncitizens to vote. It will join several towns in Maryland and Vermont that already allow noncitizens some municipal voting rights, and the city of San Francisco, which allows noncitizens to vote in school board elections. Other cities and towns in California, Maine, Illinois and Massachusetts are currently weighing similar legislation.
The Times quotes Joshua A. Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky about the move among liberal areas of the country toward the expansion of noncitizen voting.ection law. “In the so-called red places,” Douglas said, “you are moving toward more constrictions on the right to vote, which includes noncitizens. The whole world of voting rights has become one that is more polarized, even more than normal.”
The Times reports that of the estimated 808,000 adult New Yorkers who would be enfranchised by the law, about 130,000 are from the Dominican Republic and another 117,500 are from China.
At a rally outside City Hall yesterday, supporters of the bill chanted, in Spanish, a slogan from the Obama years: “Yes we can!”
For more, see the NY Times.