Vasiliki Malouchou Kanellopoulou
PhD Candidate in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Patrich Co
PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Washington
Cynthia Golembeski
PhD Candidate in Public and Urban Policy The New School for Social Research
Research Specialist, The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Politics
Tim Komatsu
PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Eduardo Mora Zúñiga
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Sebastean Pujols
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Connor Smith
PhD Candidate in Politics, The New School for Social Research
Melamid Scholar, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
Ruilong Zhang
MA Student in Politics, The New School for Social Research
KEY WORDS:
Non-Citizen Voting; New York City; Citizenship; Voting; New York City Voting; Local Governance
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Introduced in the New York City Council in January 2020, Intro 1867 revived the issue of non-citizen voting in New York City. With its passage in December 2021, Intro 1867 became Local Law 11, a law allowing legal permanent residents and non-citizens with work authorization to vote in municipal elections. It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million non-citizen New Yorkers could be enfranchised under this law. Although the impact of non-citizen voting on electoral outcomes remains debated and difficult to quantify (Mollenkopf, interview with authors, 2023), New York City would become the largest locality in the United States to permit non-citizen voting at a time when the practice becomes increasingly polarizing. Local Law 11 has yet to be implemented. In June 2022 a State Supreme Court Justice in Staten Island ruled that the Law violated the New York State Constitution. The case is set for a lengthy court challenge. It is currently pending at the State’s Second Appellate division but both sides are expected to appeal the decision.
As discussed in the first Working Paper of this series, non-citizen voting has a long, often forgotten, history. In this Working Paper we examine why non-citizen voting came back on the City Council’s agenda in 2020; how Intro 1867 was developed and who were the main actors pushing for it and opposing it; and what accounts for the adoption of Local Law 11 when so many previous initiatives failed.
Our research is based on City Council and court documents, archival materials, informational interviews, news articles, and a burgeoning literature on non-citizen voting. Partly because of the ongoing legal challenges, our access to council members and officials who spearheaded the law (or the fight against it) was restricted. While this is a significant limitation of our research, we rely on publicly available written and oral statements as evidence of their positions.
In Section I, we begin with the recent legislative history of non-citizen voting in New York City from the 1990s to the early 2010s. We then turn to the development and passage of Intro 1867 in Section II. We focus on the process by which the “municipal voter” came to be defined, the selection of a specific residence requirement, the question of whether or not to put the measure to a referendum, and the debates on the merits of non-citizen voting. Section III examines the factors that led to the passage of Local Law 11: long-term demographic trends, grassroots organizing, and a political window of opportunity. Section IV concludes with the legal challenges and the uncertain future of Local Law 11 for New York politics and beyond.