Opening Ballot Boxes (circa 1915) | Bain News Service via The Library of Congress
Even as Republican politicians continue to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral system by erroneously claiming the 2024 election will be “stolen” by undocumented immigrants, the New York Court of Appeals is quietly considering a law that would expand the right to vote in local elections to certain residents of New York City, regardless of US citizenship status.
Should Local Law 11 come into effect, anywhere from 800,000 to 1.2 million city residents with federal work authorization would become newly eligible to vote in races for mayor, city council, and several other local offices. Arguments hinge on interpretations of Article II of the State Constitution and whether the article guarantees or restricts voting rights on the basis of citizenship.
The last couple of years have been hard on Law 11, which was passed by the New York City Council in December 2021, struck down by a lower court in Staten Island in June 2022, and denied again on appeal by a New York Supreme Court judge in February 2024. The Court of Appeals is the highest court—and the law’s last chance—in the state. With immigration emerging as a major flashpoint in this election, many Democrats have shied away from vocally advocating for Local Law 11, fearing it could frighten away moderate voters. And as Mayor Eric Adams has embraced apocalyptic narratives about a ”migrant crisis” destroying New York City, hopes have dwindled that he will modify his already ambivalent stance toward Local Law 11. Certainly, this environment appears grim for the campaign in New York, as well as for noncitizen voting more widely.
Given the heated national debate about noncitizen voting, it may seem surprising that Local Law 11 exists at all. Opponents cast it as a threat to election integrity and a scandalous violation of a “sacred” link between citizenship and voting rights. Indeed, a network of conservative groups has mounted a concerted campaign to cast this as a “common-sensical” link. But in fact, noncitizen voting has a long history in the United States and is currently practiced in a handful of municipalities across the country and in up to one in four democracies worldwide.
The question of extending local voting rights to noncitizens has faded and stubbornly reemerged many times before—including during some political periods that, like now, seem especially hostile to such ideas. Earlier this year, we published two working papers with the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility focused on the historical precedents for noncitizen voting in New York City and the long history of the issue in city council debates. Noncitizen voting, we found, is a debate that usually emerges in exceptional moments when the boundaries of democratic participation suddenly appear more disputable.
If sustained efforts to discredit the integrity of elections only deepen the politics of polarization in the United States, could the tides turn again for Local Law 11?
Noncitizens have been enfranchised as voters in New York City before. Until the nineteenth century, voting rights were attached only to property ownership, race, and gender in New York State, in line with as many as 40 other US states that once allowed noncitizen voting. When the state constitution was amended in 1804, New York became one of the first states to restrict voting rights to citizens.
Decades of grassroots organizing and legislative experimentation followed. As a result of education reforms during the Civil Rights Movement, noncitizen parents were enfranchised in New York City school board elections from 1969 until 2003. In a notable example, Dominican political groups used school board elections to build durable political power across the citizen/noncitizen divide during the troubled years of the 1980s.
Since the early 2000s, achieving local political representation for noncitizens has been a focus of immigrants’ rights advocates. In 2020, a broad coalition of immigrants’ rights groups, community-based organizations, and political representatives revived the campaign for noncitizen voting in New York City under the banner Our City, Our Vote. Spearheaded by the New York Immigration Coalition and United Neighborhood Houses, it expanded the reach of previous coalitions while shifting its strategies toward increasing grassroots public actions and constituent engagement.
Exceptional political conditions opened a unique window of opportunity for the coalition. Two-thirds of city council members, including longstanding champions of noncitizen voting, were term-limited at the end of the 2021 legislative session, which enabled political risk-taking. (The law also found support amongst a younger and more progressive city council, in which many members were themselves naturalized immigrants or children of immigrants.) Despite his wavering support during the debates over the bill, Eric Adams let the bill lapse into law without vetoing it.
Most importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the narrative around municipal voting. During the pandemic, majority-immigrant neighborhoods experienced higher mortality rates, and roughly one in five of New York City’s “essential workers” were immigrants. As public debates focused on the systemic exclusion and vulnerability of immigrant New Yorkers, it became more politically feasible to challenge the conventional political imagination that naturalizes the link between citizenship and political representation—which, as we’ve pointed out, is not the venerable, stable tradition it appears to be.
Law 11’s current prospects in New York do seem dim, but similar measures in Washington, DC, and San Francisco have recently survived challenges long enough to go into effect. And should the embattled Eric Adams resign—making for another exceptional circumstance—New York City’s public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, a staunch proponent of Local Law 11, would automatically become acting mayor.
It is unclear what another Trump presidency would mean for noncitizen voting campaigns. Our City, Our Vote launched only after it became clear that Trump would not return to office in 2021, diminishing concerns over the potential weaponization of noncitizens’ voter data. Yet conversely, activists in San Francisco and Hyattsville, Maryland, were emboldened by the Trump presidency, understanding that the enfranchisement of noncitizens could serve as a bulwark against an administration hostile to many other groups, citizens included.
It is in exceptional political moments when the seemingly settled boundaries of political community, inclusion, and rights are reimagined. Campaigns in favor of noncitizen voting in the United States may very well benefit from a post-election political climate that rewards bold advocacy for a new paradigm for political inclusion. Paradoxically, this may be exactly the type of environment that emerges when one of two major political parties repeatedly casts doubt on the country’s fundamental institutions.
In a path-breaking 1993 legal article that made the case for the constitutionality of noncitizen voting, Representative Jamie Raskin put it this way: for the right to vote, “the citizenship qualification carries the aura of inevitability that once attached to property, race, and gender qualifications.” Perhaps, then, the most promising path for noncitizen voting is an environment where political “common sense” becomes more obviously contestable. Tumultuous political moments like the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, have all brought about a resurgence of questions about the limits of democratic representation, and with them, major proposals to reshape the polity. The final arguments over Local Law 11 seem to serve as a snapshot of increasingly unstable national politics, in which the nature of democracy and belonging in America is increasingly up for grabs.
