Thread: Alliance Backs Voting Rights for Noncitizens

Alliance Backs Voting Rights for Noncitizens
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: February 20, 2007


New York City should allow legal immigrants who are not citizens to vote in local elections, according to an alliance of more than 60 organizations that announced a renewed effort yesterday to secure that right.

The alliance, the New York Coalition to Expand Voting Rights, called on the City Council and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to support a bill, introduced by Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, that would allow legal immigrants who have been in the country for more than six months to vote in elections for mayor, comptroller and public advocate, as well as for the five borough presidents and 51 council members.

The effort started in 2004, after lawyers for the Council reviewed state election law and determined that the city could alter its voting statutes without action by the State Legislature, where noncitizen voting measures were introduced without success three times in the 1990s. Nothing in the State Constitution of 1938 forbids voting by noncitizens.

The local bill has the support of at least 14 council members, but has had trouble attracting broader support. Mr. Bloomberg, a vocal supporter of liberal immigration policies, said in April 2004, “The essence of citizenship is the right to vote, and you should go about becoming a citizen before you get the right to vote.”

Advocates for immigrants said that current law violates the principle of “no taxation without representation”; that it typically takes 8 to 10 years for legal immigrants to achieve citizenship; and that the city allowed noncitizens to vote in local school board elections from 1969 until 2003, when the boards were abolished.

Ron Hayduk, a political scientist at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the author of “Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States” (Routledge, 2006), said that until the 1920s, 40 states and territories allowed noncitizens to vote in local, state and even federal elections.

According to Professor Hayduk, Takoma Park and five other communities in Maryland have given noncitizens the right to vote in local elections, and noncitizens may vote in school board races in Chicago. In Massachusetts, Amherst and Cambridge have approved noncitizen voting, but the measures depend on approval by the State Legislature, and have not yet received it.

At a City Hall news conference, the New York City coalition — including the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Community Service Society, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and dozens of other groups — vowed to draw more attention to the issue, in part by getting its message out through the ethnic and immigrant press.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/nyregion/20vote.html

To the alliance, the New York Coalition to Expand Voting Rights and the City Council and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn,

If you cant get votes dont look to others that have no right to vote.

Next youll be asking children to cast a vote just because you give some candy,

Please America, candy melts

I hope the people of NY deal with Councilman Barron justly by not re-electing him when the time comes. This man should not be allowed to serve in ANY political position if he is going to propose such ridiculous legislation.

This is what happens when you have the enemy running your government. Sad really, but who would of thought that Bush would sell us out like he has done.

Barron is a vicious racist who hates whites and makes no bones about it. On Bill 0'Reilly, he said "it didn't matter to him who became the majority in the country as long as it wasn't whites."

Barron a racist...All the more reason to give him the boot!

Please America, candy melts

Two things melt in the rain, one is sugar and the other is....

This is the 'other' thing.

I want everyone to remember that HILDEBEAST started this some years ago!

It was the writing on the wall.........evident that she and her gang were greasing the wheels knowing it would take time to build momentum.