Mayor Bloomberg's commission to consider letting foreigners vote in New York City elections

By Benjamin Smith
The New York Sun
August 22-24, 2003

A mayoral commission will consider asking Governor Pataki to allow foreign citizens to vote in New York City elections.

A draft of a resolution being considered by the mayor's Charter Revision Commission would ask Mr. Pataki and the New York State Legislature to allow the city to let green-card holders who live in New York vote in elections for City Council, mayor, and other offices.

The confidential draft, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Sun, is one of four non-binding suggestions for increasing voter participation that the commission, whose main aim is abolishing party primaries, will consider voting on this month or next.

By far the most dramatic of the suggestions is the push for non-citizen voting. If embraced in Albany, it could add hundreds of thousands of permanent residents to the voting rolls and make deep changes to the very notion of citizenship. Even if -- as seems nearly certain -- Albany Republicans block the move, a recommendation from Mayor Bloomberg's blue-ribbon commission could energize a nascent movement in support of non-citizen voting among labor unions and immigrants' groups, while drawing fire from those who say it would discourage immigrants from becoming citizens.

“If they can go to war, if they can pay taxes, and if they're here legally, they should be able to vote in municipal elections,” said one member of the Charter Revision Commission, a Democratic political consultant, William Lynch.

The resolution on non-citizen voting is likely to be hotly debated even within the 11-member commission,commissioners say, and was written by commission staff after months of hearings. But the chairman of the commission, Frank Macchiarola, has already approached the mayor's office and the City Council about getting them to come out publicly in favor of the resolutions, if passed, said the commission's executive director, Alan Gartner.

“I'm serious about it, and I believe the commission is serious about it,” Mr. Gartner said.

Mr. Bloomberg's spokesman, Edward Skyler, said he had never heard the mayor give an opinion on the issue.

The debate over non-citizen voting, sometimes called “alien suffrage,” stretches back more than a century in American history.The practice was common in the early days of the republic, and it was only after World War I that the institution disappeared entirely.

More recently, in the early 1990s, a handful of liberal Washington, D.C., suburbs, including Takoma Park, Md., revived the practice. Non-citizens were also able to vote in elections for New York City community school boards from the 1970s until Mayor Bloomberg shut the boards down, although few did in practice. A few European countries, including Sweden and Estonia, allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

Recently, a movement toward letting non-citizens vote surfaced in San Francisco, where a ballot measure on the topic failed. In Cambridge, Mass., the City Council passed legislation in support of the practice. A drive is also afoot in Denver, according to a professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who studies the issue, Ronald Hayduk.

“This is a building movement in New York,” said Mr. Hayduk, who studies non-citizen voting. A Charter Revision Commission resolution “would give it a legitimacy,” he said.

New York State's 1777 constitution does not bar non-citizen voting, so a simple legislative change to election law could revive alien suffrage here. Democrats in the state Assembly periodically introduce legislation that would permit it, and a resolution under consideration in the City Council favors the measure, but no bill on the topic has ever been seriously debated at Albany.

The debate over non-citizen voting cuts to the heart of the meaning of citizenship. Its backers cite the revolutionary slogan “No taxation without representation,” and they argue that non-citizen voting would ease immigrants into the political process.

“It's an incredible political education -- the best way to encourage civic participation and involvement is to give them a stake,” Mr. Hayduk said.

But the measure's critics warn that allowing non-citizens rights normally reserved to American citizens could chip away at the foundation of the already shaky institution of citizenship.

“If you allow non-citizens to vote you are removing the incentive to take the naturalization test and become a citizen,” said a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Stanley Renshon, whose book, “The 50% American: National Identity in a Dangerous Age,” is due out next spring.

“You'll take out, if not the heart, perhaps the soul, of citizenship,” he said.

There are 1.6 million immigrants in New York City who are not citizens, according to the 2000 census; well over half, by typical official estimates, are legal. Their participation in local elections would likely give a huge boost to Hispanic candidates for citywide office, but the other effects of non-citizen voting in New York are hard to predict. Nationally, most of the moves toward making voting easier for immigrants have been pushed by Democrats and resisted by Republicans because the new voters could be crucial to their hopes for office. But in Democrat-dominated New York, that calculus isn't so clear. The move's most potent effects might be within minority communities, empowering Dominicans and South Americans within Hispanic politics, for example, perhaps at the expense of Puerto Ricans.

New York's largely immigrant service-sector labor unions are helping to drive the movement. A group that supports it is the New York Civic Participation Project, a joint venture between labor and immigrants' groups that is housed in the offices of the building workers' union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.

“The organized labor community is looking at this, as well as immigrant rights advocates,” said the project's director, Gouri Sadhwani. She said she favors extending the vote to illegal, as well as legal, immigrants.

“I don't think we should draw distinctions between people who have green cards and people who don't,” she said.

But even a resolution supporting the vote for legal immigrants would face a fight on the ground, said the leader of the Republican minority in the City Council, James Oddo of Staten Island.

“Voting is a fundamental right of being an American citizen and I don't think we should throw around that right ad hoc,” he said.

The measure's supporters, however, sometimes see an inevitability about their cause. They like to cite a line from Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on 19th-century America: “There is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength.”