Working Paper
Non-Citizen Voting: The Evolving Case of New York City, Context and Historical Case Studies
Connor Smith
PhD Candidate in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Melamid Scholar, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
Patrich Co
PhD Candidate in Politcal Science, University of Washington
Cynthia Golembeski
PhD Candidate in Public and Urban Policy The New School for Social Research
Research Specialist, The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Politics
Tim Komatsu
PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Vasiliki Malouchou Kanellopoulou
PhD Candidate in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Eduardo Mora Zúñiga
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Sebastean Pujols
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Ruilong Zhang
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Researchi
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KEY WORDS:
Non-Citizen Voting; New York City; Citizenship; Voting; Immigration; Local Governance
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In December 2021, the New York City Council passed a measure known as Local Law 11, which allows legal city residents to vote in municipal elections regardless of U.S. citizenship status. If implemented, estimates indicate that between 800,000 and 1.2 million non-citizen residents could become eligible to vote in New York City elections. However, in June 2022, a New York State judge, sitting in Staten Island, ruled that the provision violated the New York State Constitution. The city appealed the decision, and the case is currently pending in the State’s second appellate division. If the appeal is successful and the measure is implemented, New York City would become the largest jurisdiction in the U.S. to permit voting by non-citizens—thus granting them a voice in races for city council, mayor, public advocate, and other key elected positions in one of the world’s leading immigrant cities.
Local Law 11 would enfranchise a diverse demographic group making up 14.9% of the city’s total population (MOIA, 2021). While the precise change in the electorate is difficult to quantify, the Executive Director of the New York City Board of Elections testified before the City Council’s Committee of Governmental Operations that the legislation could increase the number of registered voters by as much as 20% (Ryan, 2021).2 Statistics suggest that districts in Queens, particularly areas such as Flushing, Jackson Heights, and North Corona, and districts in Upper Manhattan, particularly Washington Heights and Inwood, could see significant changes in the composition of their electorate.
This Working Paper—the first in a series of two—examines the context for this legislation, as well as the history and implications of prior instances of non-citizen voting in New York City. In the second Working Paper, we will focus on the specific debates and political struggles around Local Law 11. Across these two Papers, our research draws from city council documents, archival materials, informational interviews, and a growing field of secondary research to situate these developments in a longer history of New York City. It is a history related to deep questions about the U.S. political project, democratic representation, and the nature of citizenship itself.
Non-citizen voting is neither unprecedented nor unique to New York City, and our project sets out to explore how Local Law 11 is situated in a longer history of both the practice itself and moments of wider contestation of the boundaries of citizenship, political identity, and the electorate. In the first section of this Working Paper, we examine the context and claims of the non-citizen voting movement today. Then stepping back to examine the history of immigrant voting in the City writ large, our first case study examines the shift in discourse from widespread non-citizen voting in the post-Revolutionary U.S. to debates that came to center not on the citizenship of voters but on the capacity of naturalized foreign-born voters in the 19th century. We underscore the complexity and historical evolution of the relationship of membership in the franchised to factors of citizenship, identity, and immigration. Our second case study examines non-citizen voting in New York City school board elections in the 20th century, an instance that demonstrates how the right of non citizen participation can enable—but is distinct from—non-citizen political mobilization. Finally, we conclude by tracing the early history of the practice’s association with the immigrants’ rights movement, which resulted in sustained efforts to pass non-citizen voting provisions in the New York City Council. These efforts will be discussed in greater detail in the Working Paper to follow.
We approach New York City’s non-citizen voting law as a conceptually and materially significant development in citizenship politics, the history of non-citizen voting, and U.S. immigration debates generally. We do not claim, however, that non-citizen voting is the only (or best) means of non-citizen political participation in the City. Indeed, many of New York’s most significant moments of non-citizen political agency have emerged through community organizing, labor movements, faith-based groups, or numerous other non-electoral channels. In the cases we examine, it is also clear that the fact of enfranchisement of non citizens will not necessarily mean that they will participate in elections; episodes of non-citizen voting that had material impacts on the City were often part of sustained mobilizations or voter drives that required significant additional work and resources.
The stakes of the debates we investigate are profound: delineating the boundaries of the citizen (and ‘non-citizen’), who should have a say in shaping electoral outcomes, and the relationship between city, state, and federal governance. If the histories we examine in this Paper are any indication, these will remain points of contention well beyond this moment.