Opinion

Non-citizen voters: treating people with the respect they deserve

It would behoove us, in Vermont and the United States, to be hospitable, fair, inclusive and welcoming. The citizens of one Vermont community — Montpelier — acted upon those principles last November when they voted 2,857 to 1,488 to amend their city charter to allow residents who are not U.S. citizens but are in the country legally to vote in most local elections. Voters in Winooski, considering a similar charter change, unfortunately decided otherwise, and in 2015, Burlington voters also turned down such an initiative.

Montpelier, therefore, stands to be the first Vermont municipality to allow legal non-citizen voting, but the proposed charter amendment must first be approved by the legislature and then by Gov. Phil Scott. A bill furthering their constituents’ decision was submitted for this legislative session by Democratic state Reps. Mary Hooper and Warren Kitzmiller, and is now being considered by the House Government Operations Committee. Kitzmiller recently predicted that the bill, H.207, will be approved by the committee and then by the full House, largely along party lines, with the same results in the Senate. He was less certain that Scott would sign the legislation.

Here’s hoping Kitzmiller’s predictions are correct, and that the governor signs on. Why? For one thing, it’s a decision that Montpelier voters made, with a fairly healthy margin, about conducting their own local affairs. Nor do there seem to be legal nor constitutional barriers. The director of elections in the Secretary of State’s office explained last week that as long as the proposed change applied only to local issues — not state or federal elections, and in fact not to some decisions affecting the Montpelier-Roxbury school district because the charter change must not affect Roxbury — local voters should have their way.

Which they did, of course, in Winooski and Burlington. The resistance registered by majority voters in those cities, and by the minority in Montpelier who opposed the measure, may stem from an assumption that noncitizens have somehow rejected the opportunities and responsibilities that citizenship confers, or perhaps that they are transients and won’t be around long enough to have a real stake in the outcome of a vote. There could, for some — a minority, we’re sure — be darker reasons, rooted in antipathy to immigration.

But, if we believe in democratic self-government, we should agree that people have an intrinsic right to vote, to participate so far as the law allows in decisions that affect them. This is especially true when, in so many ways, they contribute to their communities: providing their skills to employers who benefit from them; patronizing local stores and businesses; owning or renting property; paying the taxes levied on all these activities to support local police and fire services and fix the sidewalks and sewers; and sending their kids to school.

It’s not like Montpelier is trailblazing some whacked-out political theory. Legal noncitizen residents can vote on local issues in various communities in Illinois, California and New York. In Takoma Park, Maryland, they’ve been doing it since 1992.

Predictably, though, conservative ideologues have launched a determined campaign against such provisions. U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-South Carolina — whose native Southland pretends (when it serves the South’s interests) to be a bastion for “states’ rights!” — has introduced a bill in Congress that would ban all federal funding from going to states and municipalities that allow what he calls “alien suffrage.”

Clearly discomfited by support for non-citizen voting by nemeses Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and the evil City of San Francisco, Duncan wrote, in the National Review, that “even when advancing the radical policy of noncitizen voting, (liberals) can’t state their true view: that drawing a distinction between citizens and non-citizens of the United States is immoral. It’s the same principle that leads them to oppose both securing the border with a wall and enacting effective immigration enforcement measures. But, in the same way that a strong border is what protects the citizens of the United States from drug trafficking and terrorism, a strong border between who is and is not a voting member of our Republic based on citizenship protects and upholds the legitimacy of our institutions.”

All Montpelier’s voters wanted to do was invite the folks who pass them on the sidewalks every day to be treated as the neighbors and community members they are. That’s not throwing open the borders, and it’s not advancing some radical agenda aimed at erasing the concept of citizenship. It’s just treating people with the respect they deserve.

Don’t you agree, governor?

Online: bit.ly/2CS2m

 

Originally published in the Rutland Herald, April 1.

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