The Alien Voting Boomerang

Be careful for what you wish. That’s our advice to liberals gloating over the decision of the City Council in New York to legalize voting by legal aliens — or “non-citizens,” as it’s being retailed. At first blush, the move looks like a naked grab for votes by the Democratic Party-dominated local legislature. On second blush, the noble comrades might want to take a look at the latest Wall Street Journal poll.It turns out, as the Journal itself reports the results of its poll, the nation’s “large and diverse group of Hispanic voters is showing signs of dividing its support between Democrats and Republicans more evenly than in recent elections.” The Journal calls it “a troubling development for the Democratic Party, which has long counted on outsize Hispanic support.”It’s all the more startling because only a year ago, according to the Journal’s survey, Hispanic voters gave Democratic House candidates more than 60 percent of their vote. Now they are evenly split, with 37 percent of Hispanic voters saying they would support the Republican congressional candidate and 37 percent reckoning they would favor the Democrat. Some 22 percent are fetching up as undecided.It gets more startling still. Hispanic voters are “also evenly divided when asked about a hypothetical rematch in 2024 of the last presidential contenders, with 44 percent saying they would back President Biden and 43 percent supporting former President Donald Trump.” The Journal quotes AP VoteCast as reporting that in 2020, “Mr. Biden won 63 percent support among Hispanic voters, nearly 30 points more than Mr. Trump.”These are gobsmacking numbers. Hispanic voters, the Journal notes, account for one in eight eligible voters and “are one of the fastest-growing groups in the electorate.” It reckons that those factors “compound Democratic fears about any deterioration in support.” The Journal quotes one Democratic pollster, John Anzalone, as saying: “Latinos are more and more becoming swing voters,” and “a swing vote that we’re going to have to fight for.”We offer all this as but context to the action by the City Council yesterday in New York. The legislation just passed would, according to the Times’s estimate, grant the right to vote for some 800,000 legal residents who lack for citizenship here. We haven’t seen estimates on how many of those might be Hispanics. If the pollsters who conducted the Journal’s poll are right, though, the issue is not race or identity politics so much as economics.It’s also unclear whether what the City Council just did is jake with the New York State Constitution. That parchment limits “the right of suffrage” to “citizens.” Noting every “citizen shall be entitled to vote at every election” as well as on “all questions submitted to the vote of the people,” the Constitution directs laws “be made for ascertaining, by proper proofs, the citizens who shall be entitled to the right of suffrage hereby established.”Empire State law is similarly discouraging to the council’s effort. “No person shall be qualified to register for and vote at any election unless he is a citizen of the United States,” the Consolidated Laws report. The Department of State also cautions that the Municipal Home Rule Law forbids a local government “to adopt a local law which supersedes a State statute relating to the subjects set forth therein.”The U.S. Constitution says that all “persons born or naturalized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It forbids states to “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens,” yet keeps silent on the question of non-citizen voting in state and local elections. It wouldn’t surprise us if New York Democrats come to regret not taking the same approach.

The Alien Voting Boomerang

The Alien Voting Boomerang

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