The city council is expected to pass the bill on Thursday.
New York City councilman Robert Holden blasted a bill that would permit an estimated 800,000 non-citizens to vote in municipal elections, in an interview with National Review.
The bill, known as Intro 1867, is expected to pass a City Council vote on Thursday, with a veto-proof majority of at least 35 out of 51 council members signing on as co-sponsors. Under the law, green-card holders, residents with work permits, and DACA recipients would be able to cast ballots in municipal races beginning in 2023, as long as they lived in New York City for at least 30 days prior to an election.
The legislation orders the Board of Elections to formulate a plan by July 2022 to facilitate non-citizen voting, which would see elections workers design separate ballots for non-citizens, who are not permitted to vote in state and federal elections.
“I think this is a terribly bad bill. It’s amazing it has this many cosponsors,” Holden said. “For the life of me I don’t know why any elected official would want this.”
In particular, Holden took issue with the minimum 30-day residency period. Holden said that requirement was derived from existing requirements for U.S. citizens who move to a different state, and must live in New York for 30 days before registering to vote.
“When you think about it, it’s absurd for somebody who’s a non-citizen to establish residency in New York City for 30 days, and then you can vote in all municipal elections,” Holden said.
One of the issues with the requirement is a practical matter: If non-citizens only need 30 days to register to vote, a politician could have difficulty developing a campaign geared toward them in that time period.
“How could I reach those voters if I don’t know who they are and they only have 30 days to establish and decide that they want to register to vote?” Holden said. “Why would any elected official want that, where they couldn’t even campaign, couldn’t even tell prospective voters what they want or what they stand for or who they are?”
The short residency period rankled another Democratic city councilman, Reverend Rubén Díaz of the Bronx.
“New York City, which is home to both the United Nations and Wall Street, could easily be taken over by any group of noncitizens who live here for 30 days and vote for the leader of their choice,” Díaz wrote in a letter to constituents in late November. “Why would we ever make ourselves vulnerable to this kind of possible threat?”
Holden said that municipal elections can be very close, noting that he won his own first general election, in 2017, by 137 votes out of about 20,000 total. Depending on the demographics of a particular district, a non-citizen voting bloc could be a determining factor in elections.
“The ramifications of this are immense. It could decide many council races around the city of New York, it could decide the mayoral election,” Holden said. “Eric Adams only won the Democratic primary by 7,000 votes or so.”
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat who represents Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan, first submitted the legislation. Rodriguez has argued that the bill will give fair representation to non-citizens who contribute to the city through work and paying taxes.
“I think that there’s people in our society that go to sleep with so much fear of immigrants that they try to make an argument to disqualify their right to elect their local leaders,” Rodriguez told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “This is about whether we are living in New York City, we are contributing to New York City and paying taxes in New York City.”
However, Holden and some other council members have countered that one should be able to vote only after obtaining citizenship.
The bill “devalues citizenship, and citizenship is the standard by which the state constitution issues or allows for suffrage in New York state elections at all levels,” Councilman Joseph Borelli, a Republican from Staten Island, told the AP.
New York Republicans have already threatened legal challenges to the bill, which they say could be unconstitutional. Mayor Bill de Blasio has also indicated he thinks the bill will not survive a legal challenge.
“Every citizen shall be entitled to vote at every election . . . provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or village for thirty days next preceding an election,” Article II, Section I of the state constitution reads.
“I don’t get how the City Council can even draft this when the mayor himself, de Blasio, has said he doesn’t believe it’s legal because the state constitution states that citizens can vote,” Holden remarked.