Noncitizen voting is unconstitutional in New York, the state’s high court ruled on March 20, striking down a New York City law that permitted noncitizens to vote in municipal elections.
The ruling blocks more than 800,000 permanent New York City residents from voting in local elections.
New York’s Democrat-led city council passed Local Law 11 in the final days of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, granting municipal voting rights to noncitizens who had been lawful permanent residents of New York City for at least 30 days, along with those authorized to work in the United States.
Neither de Blasio nor Mayor Eric Adams signed or vetoed the law. That allowed it to briefly take effect in January 2022 before a swift legal challenge from Republicans put its enforcement on hold.
The lawsuit charged that the new law violated Article II of the state’s constitution, which states that “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.”
Defenders of the city law said that language merely establishes the floor—not the ceiling—for voting rights in the state and that municipalities could expand those rights as they saw fit. But the state’s high court, like the lower courts before it, dismissed that argument.
“Under that interpretation, municipalities are free to enact legislation that would enable anyone to vote—including, as counsel for appellants stated during oral argument, thirteen-year-old children,” Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
Wilson also cited constitutional requirements that “citizens” vote by ballot and provide proof of their voting eligibility as further evidence that only citizens could vote.
“It is plain from the language and restrictions contained in Article II that ‘citizen’ is not meant as a floor, but as a condition of voter eligibility: the franchise extends only to citizens whose right to vote is established by proper proofs,” he wrote.
Judge Jenny Rivera disagreed. In her dissenting opinion, she wrote that state law grants localities “broad authority” over the structure of their elections and that the constitution’s declaration that citizens have a right to vote does not bar the expansion of that right to noncitizens.
As an example, Rivera pointed to a constitutional provision that excludes “persons” convicted of certain crimes from the right to vote. That verbiage, she contended, was meant to include “any noncitizens convicted of those crimes whom localities might otherwise enfranchise in local elections.”
Rivera went on to charge that the majority’s decision “diminishes the power of localities statewide.”
U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who represents Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, heralded the court’s ruling.
“There is nothing more important than preserving the integrity of our election system, and in today’s age, the government should be working to create more trust in our elections, not less,” the congresswoman said in a statement.
“The right to vote is a sacred right given only to United States citizens. It is my hope that left-wing lawmakers stop pushing these unconstitutional and reckless measures that dilute the voices of American citizens.”
