Noncitizen Voting Laws Fail Legal Tests
August 10, 2022
Bob Dane
Executive Director
At the beginning of this year, 15 U.S. municipalities allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections. In one of those cities, San Francisco, a media outlet gushed: “Noncitizen voting rights gain traction.”
Those so-called “rights” hit a brick wall in June and again last month when courts in New York and California struck down noncitizen voting laws, ruling they violated the state constitutions. These seemed like open-and-shut cases; even a liberal legal team at UC Berkeley concluded that “voter eligibility is not a municipal affair.”
Yet other jurisdictions, for now, continue to allow noncitizens into voting booths. Some Maryland communities permit all residents to cast ballots, regardless of citizenship or immigration status – effectively enfranchising illegal aliens.
“The worrisome trend is that if these laws are not invalidated, they will spread, and even federal elections will not be immune. Then the American people will have lost a big share of their power to govern themselves, and decide the destiny of their own country,” says Christopher Hajec, director of litigation at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm of FAIR.
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2022/08/10/noncitizen-voting-laws-fail-legal-tests
