Brad Raffensperger vs. Noncitizen Voting New York Democrats hand the GOP a winning political issue.
Eric Adams has made his first mistake as New York City’s new mayor, endorsing a City Council bill to let roughly 800,000 noncitizens vote in local elections. Mr. Adams said Saturday he looks forward to “bringing millions more into the democratic process”—assuming a court doesn’t block the plan, which is possible.
In either case, New York’s Democrats are handing Republicans a political issue. Note what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on TV over the weekend: “I think that we should have a constitutional amendment, a U.S. constitutional amendment, that only American citizens vote in our elections.”
The host, CBS’s Margaret Brennan, tried to do an instant fact check. “Only U.S. citizens do currently vote in elections, but go on,” she said. This ill-informed response from somebody in the news business suggests average Americans will be blindsided when they hear what New York is doing. It goes way past the experiments with noncitizen voting that a handful of other cities have tried.
San Francisco, notably, opened up elections only for school board, and turnout has been low. In 2020, a city official says, 36 noncitizens registered and 31 voted. In 2018 there were 59 ballots. For context, the current registration form warns that data provided by prospective voters, including name and address, “may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
New York is going further by trying to give foreigners a say in electing the Mayor and City Council that govern America’s biggest city, including 8.8 million people, vital industries like financial services, and numerous assets of value to national security. The city’s bill requires that noncitizen voters have at least work authorization, but its residency requirement to vote is only 30 days, which would invite voting by transients and other mischief.
Mr. Raffensperger is right that public opinion would probably cut 60-40 against New York’s plan, or maybe worse for Democrats. Amending the Constitution is a heavy lift, but opposition to noncitizen voting sounds like a political winner for Republicans.
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