Voting Rights Roundup: New York City may soon grant local voting rights to permanent legal residents
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Leading Off ● New York City, NY: With a supermajority of members sponsoring the legislation, New York's heavily Democratic City Council could adopt a bill this month that would grant voting rights in local elections to roughly 800,000 noncitizens who are pVoting Rights Roundup: New York City may soon grant local voting rights to permanent legal residents
Leading Off ● New York City, NY: With a supermajority of members sponsoring the legislation, New York's heavily Democratic City Council could adopt a bill this month that would grant voting rights in local elections to roughly 800,000 noncitizens who are permanent legal residents. Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio recently said he wouldn't veto the bill despite his concerns about its legality, and incoming Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who takes office Jan. 1, supports the idea. A handful of small localities nationally have granted voting rights in local elections to noncitizen permanent residents, and San Francisco has done so in school board elections, but New York would dwarf those places in impact. Though it may come as a surprise to many, proposals like this actually have a long history in U.S. politics. For much of the 19th century and up until around the 1920s, many states granted a measure of voting rights to noncitizens who had permanently immigrated to the country. It's also the norm in many European democracies: In the European Union, EU citizens have the right to vote in elections for local government and the European Parliament in whichever member country they reside, and noncitizen residents have some degree of local voting rights in more than a dozen nations. Read more