The Independent View: NYC Could Change Who Can Vote by Intro 410 Bill

Intro 410 is a bill to expand voting in all municipal elections to anyone over the age of 18 legally residing in the city currently has 31 co-sponsors. When the new City Council is seated in January the bill could gain enough new co-sponsors to make it veto-proof. Permanent residents with green cards all the way down to holders of six-month student visas will be allowed to vote for mayor, comptroller, public advocate and members of the City Council, the same as any citizen of the United States.

The bill’s prime sponsor is Councilman Danny Dromm of Jackson Heights. Those of the bill’s current co-sponsors who are leaving the Council could be replaced by a probable supporter, so the bill will certainly have a majority, if not a super-majority, as Councilman Dromm believes is likely, capable of overriding a mayoral veto should the next mayor oppose the legislation.

Councilman Mark Weprin, a co-sponsor of the bill, says that it is “only fair to let people who have a stake in the future of the city be able to choose their representatives in government.” Dromm, at a hearing on the bill last May, spoke of American history as a gradual expansion of the franchise from propertied white men to all white men to African-Americans, women and 18-year-olds. “The demographics of voters have changed over time, and this bill would just be the natural step in our nation’s voting history,” Dromm said.

New York City revived the practice of voting for all in 1969, when the Board of Education instituted local control of primary and intermediate schools. Community school boards composed of local residents were tasked with hiring district superintendents and setting school policy, following protests by black and Latino parents angered that the mostly white central board ignored their concerns. School board members stood for three-year terms, and elections for these seats were open to all residents of the city until 2002, when the state Legislature abolished the boards and handed control of the city’s education system over to the mayor.

More recently, a number of Council members have introduced a system of direct democracy in their districts in the form of participatory budgeting, which allows all residents of the district, regardless of their citizenship status, to vote on the allocation of a portion of each district’s discretionary funding. The system has been popular where administered, although surveys do indicate fairly low interest on the part of non-citizens so far.

The logistics of carrying out Intro 410 are formidable. To begin with, the law would allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections, though they would still be barred from casting a ballot for state or federal level offices. So in the recent primary election, for example, a non-citizen voter would have been permitted to vote for mayor, but not for district attorney, since DA is considered a county office, not a municipal one and a judgeship would also not be covered by the law. In this year’s general election, non-citizen voters could weigh in on who they wanted to be their Council member, but not on any of the referendums on the ballot. Thus the Board of Elections will have to devise different ballots for different voters, and hand them out correctly.

The mechanics of this process presents a challenge. Intro 410 very specifically precludes the establishment of any distinctions between citizen voters and non-citizen voters that could be ascertained by an observer, meaning that non-citizen voters could not legally be sent to separate polling sites, or asked to stand in a different line to vote. The law will require the collation of what it calls “municipal voters” into the same poll lists as citizen voters, yet with enough distinction built in to block those voters from voting out of their class.

The impact of non-citizen voting on elections in New York City could be massive, depending on turnout. Estimates of the city’s non-citizen population are rough, but based upon one estimate it appears to number approximately 1.8 million people, 1.4 million of whom are over the age of 18. Of these, approximately 850,000 are legal residents of the city and would qualify under Intro 410 to participate in city elections, thereby expanding the electorate by about one quarter.

Another factor that needs to be thought through is voter fraud. , It is worth contemplating what Election Day will look like in New York City if and when voting by non-citizens becomes a reality. Holders of virtually any kind of visa, except tourist visas, will be allowed to vote. There will be no check on who is allowed to register: The bar will be, as it is currently, strictly the word of the registrant that he or she is entitled to vote. Yet whereas now it is relatively easy to confirm if someone is a citizen, one’s visa status is mutable and often uncertain. Visa holders fall in and out of compliance. Both New York City’s Board of Elections and Campaign Finance Board currently perform no examination of citizenship status for voters, or even campaign contributors, though federal law permits only citizens to vote, and allows only citizens or legal permanent residents to donate to campaigns. If Intro 410 becomes law as written, plausible deniability for electoral irregularities will be immeasurably increased. Intro 410 will create a massive grey area in election law where none currently exists.

Even some of the bill’s sponsors aren’t entirely clear about its implications. “If you have a green card, are waiting to get citizenship and pay taxes, it seems that you should be able to vote,” said Councilman Weprin when asked about his support for Intro 410. When told that the law is not limited to permanent residents, to people who want to become citizens, or to taxpayers, Weprin was nonplussed. “Are we talking about the same bill?” he asked.

Let me know what you think of Intro 410 and how you would implement it, if it became the law.