Last week, the New York City council granted noncitizens with green cards or work visas the right to vote in local elections, becoming the largest U.S. city to do so. About a million adult noncitizens live in New York City, equal to roughly 20 percent of currently registered voters. This is enough to change the outcome of close primaries and elections. New York City joins 14 smaller jurisdictions in the U.S. that allow noncitizens to vote, including San Francisco which recently let noncitizens vote in school boardelections. This trend is going in the wrong direction for several reasons, some of which I will outline here today.
First, every vote cast by a noncitizen nullifies a vote cast by a U.S. citizen who should come first in their own country. The noncitizens had the right to vote in their own country, but they freely left it behind. It can’t have been very important to them. The fact they pay taxes here is completely irrelevant.
Which raises the second objection. This is all part of the Democrats’ plan to devalue citizenship, trash patriotism, get people to think it’s no longer important to be an American, and destroy America as it was founded. This is so the Democrats have a better chance of staying in power forever and imposing their collectivist authoritarian ideology on the rest of us. The Democrats are up to no good and are using noncitizens as pawns in their cynical power games.
Third, noncitizen voters don’t have to know anything about the Bill of Rights or the U.S. Constitution. They don’t have to have any acquaintance with freedom of speech or religion, underlying constitutional values like popular sovereignty, or understand our American form of government in the least. And they certainly don’t have to believe in any of these things to cast their vote. They can come from any system – communism, dictatorship, oligarchy, what have you – support those systems, not swear allegiance to the U.S., even hate America, and still have their vote count just as much as citizens who faithfully believe in American ideals.
Not every Democrat is on board with this. One New York City councilman, a Democrat, pointed out that, with just a 30-day residency requirement, a large group of noncitizens could easily move to New York City, take it over, then leave. In addition, immigration advocates worry that noncitizens will mistakenly vote in state and federal elections, putting them in legal jeopardy and forever ending their chances of becoming citizens. They also worry voter roll information about noncitizens will fall into the wrong hands and be used to injure noncitizens in various ways.
The Democrats always prattle on about how their opponents are waging war on democracy. But they should look in the mirror. Nothing wages war on democracy more than letting noncitizens potentially determine what goes on here. A poll showed most New Yorkers do not want noncitizen voting. What about them? What about their democracy? The Democrats are such hypocrites in this regard. They call noncitizen voting the ‘next frontier of democracy’ when what they are really trying to do is destroy democracy and frustrate the popular will.
This is the wrong direction, but there are ways to stop this movement. Citizens in Alabama, Colorado, and Florida approved amendments to their state constitutions by large majorities last year to bar noncitizen voting. Senator Marco Rubio will introduce legislation to strip federal funding from cities that allow noncitizens to vote. I encourage you, if you still believe in America and want it to remain the land of the free, to get up off the couch and do something to prevent noncitizens from voting in any of our elections. If you don’t know what to do, go to the OnlyCitizens [dot]Vote website on the Internet.
