Only Citizens Deserve the Right to Vote, in Maine and Beyond

D espite receiving pushback from local counsel, Portland, Maine’s new Charter Commission voted 10–2 earlier this month in favor of allowing noncitizens to vote in city elections. The commission’s legal team has now been tasked with drafting a noncitizen-voting proposal to be put to local voters as a future ballot question.

If the proposal is ultimately approved by voters and survives the legal challenges that would surely result, Portland would become the 16th jurisdiction in the country to allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections, joining eleven jurisdictions in Maryland, two in Vermont, New York City, and San Francisco.

Bad ideas that undermine Portland’s people and economy aren’t new to the city’s politics. In 2020, Portland voters approved ballot questions that increased the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, implemented a city-wide “Green New Deal” that has obliterated residential-construction efforts, and enacted rent-control policies that will undercut the city’s long-term affordable-housing goals. The ballot questions were endorsed and brought to voters by the Southern Maine Democratic Socialists of America.

Interestingly, Portland already weighed in on the idea of allowing noncitizens to vote back in 2010, when 52 percent of voters rejected it. But that hasn’t stopped partisan activists in Maine’s largest and most left-wing city from pushing the policy back to center stage this year. Their renewed efforts couldn’t come at a worse time, as advocates across the country fight for greater transparency, integrity, and accountability in elections.

According to Pew Research Center, as of 2017, there were approximately 25 million noncitizens living in the U.S., including 12.3 million permanent residents, 2.2 million temporary residents with legal permission to be in the country, and 10.5 million noncitizens here illegally. It’s estimated that there are at least 3,100 noncitizen residents of Portland who would be allowed to vote in municipal elections if the law were changed — certainly enough people to sway a close election in a city of just over 68,000 residents.

Article II, Section 1 of the Maine constitution requires that one must be a citizen to vote in state elections; it makes no mention of local elections. Title 21-A, Section 111 of Maine law is clearer; it says that a “person must be a citizen of the United States” to “vote in any election in a municipality.” When the Charter Commission examined this idea back in 2010, local counsel estimated that it would more than likely fail to withstand legal scrutiny from the courts. Yet the members of the city’s Charter Commission are now moving forward anyway, testing the limits of the city’s home-rule authority.

It seems so basic that I chuckle having to write it, but the right to vote should be reserved for citizens. Every vote cast in an election by a noncitizen dilutes the vote of a citizen. Allowing noncitizens to vote in Portland elections would undermine the security of those elections. And without an accurate count of how many noncitizens reside within city limits, there can be no confidence among citizens in the outcomes of those elections.

The idea seems a particular affront to those Portlanders who came to the U.S. and went through the legal process to earn citizenship and the right to vote. It would also undoubtedly discourage other noncitizens who reside in Portland from seeking to become citizens, since it would hand them the voting rights that are perhaps the biggest benefit of citizenship.

Soon, Portland voters will again be presented with a ballot question that asks them if noncitizens should be allowed to vote in city elections. As they did in 2010, they should say no.