By John Fund
Sunday, January
09, 2022
Despite misgivings, New York
City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, has rolled over for the city council and allowed
more than 800,000 noncitizen residents to vote in future elections for mayor
and all other city officials.
Starting in 2023, the city will have to
print separate ballots for city races, since noncitizens will still be barred
from voting in statewide and presidential elections. But make no mistake. The
new New York law is part of a nationwide push to blur the very meaning of
citizenship and promote noncitizen voting everywhere and for all offices.
There are few limits on how far the “woke”
Left will go to change the rules of voting. In 2019, a majority of House
Democrats voted to lower the federal voting age to 16 years, from 18. This
week, Senate Democrats will try to ram through a bill that would nationalize
elections by taking away the right of states to determine their own voting
systems. Liberals will use any hysterical argument to justify this power grab:
Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) even told MSNBC last week that if
Republicans win November’s midterm elections, “voting in this country as we know
it will be gone.”
New York City’s law was promoted by former
councilman Ydanis Rodríguez, who immigrated to the city from the Dominican
Republic and is now the commissioner of the New York City Department of
Transportation. If noncitizens “pay their taxes as I did when I had a green
card,” he says, “then they should have a right to elect their local leaders.”
He notes that the new law will limit the right to vote to legal residents and
green-card holders.
But that’s only because an earlier version
of his legislation from 2013 that would have given the vote to illegal aliens
simply generated too much political heat. Many backers of noncitizen voting
acknowledge that since many illegal aliens also pay income, payroll, and sales
taxes, they too should be allowed to vote. No doubt the advocates of the plan
hope that the example of New York will fuel their goal of extending rights to
illegal aliens. “As New York City goes, so goes the rest of the world,” former
New York City councilman David Dromm, an original backer of noncitizen voting,
has boasted.
Until now, the movement he’s a part of had
made only snail-like progress. Six communities in Maryland allow it for local
elections. Even in radical San Francisco, only 54 percent of voters in 2016
approved a measure to give voting rights to noncitizens in school-board
elections. No significant legal challenges have been mounted against the
smattering of cities that have allowed noncitizen voting.
But the new law in the nation’s largest
city will throw noncitizen voting into a high-stakes legal battle. The
constitution of New York State clearly states that all citizens over the age of
18 are entitled to vote. While it is silent on allowing noncitizen voting,
judges may require that right to be made explicit through the laborious process
of amending the
state constitution.
Even former mayor Bill de Blaiso admitted
while he was in office that the concept involved “big legal
questions.” He would have preferred “to make sure
that there’s maximum incentive to finish the citizenship process.”
The very notion of noncitizen voting is
fraught with peril, especially in a big city such as New York. Seth Barron, a
contributor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, notes that
the city’s board of elections has long been a den of partisan hacks and has
consistently demonstrated its incompetence, most recently in the Democratic
primary for mayor last year. He also questions how
legitimate some city-council races would be in
parts of Queens or the Bronx where more than 50 percent of the population is
made up of foreign citizens.
In 2016, New York Board of Elections
commissioner Alan Schulkin, a Democrat, was videotaped at a party by Project Veritas
confirming the existence of voter fraud and decrying the city’s failure to
require voter ID. “Certain neighborhoods in particular, they bus people around
to vote,” Schulkin said on the tape. “They put them in a bus and go poll site
to poll site.” Schulkin was forced to
resign by de Blasio for saying “absolutely the reverse
of what someone should be saying on the Board of Elections.” In other words,
these aren’t the scandals anyone should be looking for.
Few experts believe that in a place where
noncitizen voting is allowed there would be effective enforcement of laws still
barring illegal aliens from voting. They already can choose to vote without
much fear of detection. A 2014 study by two Old Dominion University professors, based on survey data
from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent
of all noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election and that
2.2 percent did in the 2010 midterms.
Given that 80 percent of noncitizens lean
Democratic, they cite Al Franken ‘s 312-vote win in the 2008 U.S. Senate race
in Minnesota as one likely tipped by noncitizen voting. That election also had
profound consequences. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote to break the
filibuster — a vote that was needed to make Obamacare law.
That kind of impact on national policy has
prompted Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, himself the son of Cuban immigrants, to introduce a
bill to prohibit federal funding to states and localities that allow foreigners
to vote. “It’s ridiculous that states are allowing foreign citizens to vote,”
Rubio says. “However, if states and localities do let those who are not U.S.
citizens to vote in elections, they shouldn’t get U.S. citizen taxpayer money.”
I’m very much in favor of having people
legally living in this country establish ties to the community and have a say
in their governance. As Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the right
way to bring noncitizens into the electoral process at the federal, state, and
local levels is old-fashioned: encourage them to become citizens.” It’s not
hard to go that route for legal residents — they must have been in the U.S. for
five years, pay some fees, and pass a test, given in English, on U.S.
institutions.
What is so unfair about the system we have
now? The answer is that it doesn’t suit the blatantly political imperatives of
the woke Left, and that is a key reason the reason noncitizen voting must be
rejected.
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