My city’s mayor has said that he wants to allow all residents the right to vote in municipal elections, even if they aren’t US citizens. I highly doubt that he will actually be able to do it, but has anything like this ever been done?
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I think it has been done and it certainly can be done, although I wonder how they issue voting cards that don’t allow them to vote in state or federal elections.
Yes, municipalities, school districts, etc. have allowed vote of resident immigrants strictly for internal elections, and a few communities do so now. While New York City had an elected school board (until 2002) noncitizens who had children in the system could vote in the school district election. This is of course if there is no state-level (law or constitution) preemption against passing such a measure.
Some states had noncitizen statewide vote in the past, a few until the 1910s and 20s.
In many cases the strictly-local elections are offset from the state/federal and only those local votes are on the ballot paper or machine screen. I’d have to ask someone from those towns if the noncitizen voter would have an annotation in the poll workers’ voter list and on their voter card.
Depends. Minneapolis, for example, has odd-year municipal elections, one year after each Presidential election, so a non-citizen ID would just not be accepted on even-year election days. (Note: this is a terrible idea. If you think midterm voter turnout is low, just see what it looks like when there isn’t even a governor on the ballot. Plus the extra expense of setting up an additional citywide election, instead of piggybacking on the state/federal elections.)
In sane cities that have municipal elections in normal election years, I would imagine you would just have a separate ballot for non-citizens that only has municipal offices on it, or separate municipal offices entirely and give citizens both a municipal ballot and a state/federal ballot.
On the view that local governments are essentially service-providing agencies funded by local taxation, it makes perfect sense that anybody liable to the taxation should have a vote, regardless of citizenship status. Questions of loyalty or allegiance don’t enter into it; local governments are not sovereign entities which can make such demands.
For many years local governments in the UK were funded by local property taxes (“rates”), and the local government electoral franchise depended on owning or occupying rateable property in the district, regardless of citizenship status. This has now changed; the local government electoral franchise has been assimiliated to the parliamentary franchise, and requires British citizenship, EU citizenship or citizenship of a Commonwealth country coupled with a right of settlement in the UK. But a number of countries whose electoral law was inherited from the UK still allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, e.g. Australia, Ireland.
This wikipedia article suggests that there are a number of munipalities in the US which allow non-citizen voting.
I think you can justify non-citizen voting, but the hoops to jump through should be more onerous, since it is not actually a civil right. Non-citizens should have to be taxpayers to vote, IMO.
Should those who finesse the system so they end up paying no taxes lose their right to vote?
If your jurisdiction has a sales tax, then it is ridiculously unlikely that a potential non-citizen voter has managed to avoid paying it.
The former is, I believe, what Ohio does with 17 year olds who are eligible to vote in a primary election. Sometimes a primary is held concurrently with something that you have to be 18 to vote on, so a 17 year old can’t always get the regular ballot.
Doesn’ count, since even tourists pay sales taxes. I’m talking the taxes only permanent residents pay, since obviously you’re not going to extend suffrage to tourists no matter how much tax they pay while here.
So we’re talking income taxes and property taxes.
Not every municipality collects an income tax, and even where they do, many citizens make too little to pay. Are you proposing to disenfranchise them too?
Only property owners actually pay property taxes; renters have taxes built into their rates, but they don’t pay a separate line item. How would you propose to handle those whose taxes are paid by a landlord? What about condominiums, which in a few places have the taxes incorporated into the maintenance fee and paid by the owner’s association?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If a permanent resident pays tax, why should that be disregarded when considering their qualification to vote simply because someone who is not a permanent resident pays the same tax?
Besides, property tax is not a tax paid only by permanent residents. You pay property tax on properties that you own; you may reside somewhere completely different.
And the same is true, come to think of it, of income tax. Non-residents of the US are liable to US income tax on their US-source income.
I don’t know if there are any taxes which are payable only by permanent residents.
And be sent to Guantanamo! No, wait, swim to Guantanamo. Sharks, what sharks, good luck, chum!
In my state, there’s no income tax and if you never own a home, you never pay property tax directly. Should citizen renters also not be able to vote? Or, in other words, “must pay taxes” is a silly threshold.
If laws affect you, why should you not have a say in who makes those laws? Taxation without representation is something we’re defending now?
We should extend suffrage to far more people than we currently do, including children, felons and non-citizen residents. I’m not even against tourists, or foreigners having a say. Don’t make laws which govern the lives of non-citizens if you don’t want to give those people a vote.
Just so everyone knows, the reason I don’t think this could happen wasn’t a constitutional basis or anything like that. My mayor has very little real power, and is basically the chairman of the City Council, and has the same vote as the other councilors. He still likes to talk big, and often acts like he has more power than he really does. He has a habit of asking for drastic changes, which often get shot down or greatly diminished by the manager and the rest of the council.
It shouldn’t be that complicated. AFAIK it’s the county that’s responsible for getting the right ballots and informational pamphlets out to everyone, ensuring you are allowed to vote only for officials who represent your jurisdiction, and further, only when those particular offices are up for election. Accordingly the system already needs to print many, many variations of the ballot just within a single county. I’d think the logic to exclude non-citizen residents from voting on state and federal level propositions or candidates could easily be added to the systems they have now.
Do you actually have residents who aren’t taxpayers? How does that work? I’m a resident of Japan but not a citizen and I pay ALL taxes that citizens do (actually, even more than citizens because there are foriegn registration fees, renewal of ID fees etc.).
Cities typically aren’t funded completely locally. They tend to get various grants from state and federal programs, which of course are financed by the taxpayers of the larger jurisdiction. Tourists pay (extremely high) local taxes on lodging, and pay sales tax when they’re there.
If the criterion for voting is “paying into the city’s operations,” then there’s unfairness in restricting the franchise only to residents.