Letting noncitizens vote devalues citizenship

Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, sponsor of the current legislation, which is scheduled for a vote in early December, argues that enfranchising noncitizens is “not about doing a favor to immigrants by allowing them to vote. If they pay their taxes as I did when I had a green card, then they should have a right to elect their local leaders.” This argument, based on the principle of taxation requiring representation, has a certain facile appeal. But if paying taxes is the basis for the franchise, then why has Rodriguez limited his bill to legal permanent residents? An earlier version of the legislation, from 2013, would have given the vote to illegal aliens, too—the same argument about taxes was made then, given that some of these people, typically using stolen Social Security numbers, pay income and payroll taxes. If they contribute, shouldn’t they be allowed to vote, too?

A major problem with this argument, for a leftist electorate, is that it establishes the payment of taxes as a precondition for voting, on grounds that only those contributing to the public treasury should have a say in spending it. John Stuart Mill articulated this point in 1859, explaining that “those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people’s money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize.” More familiarly—and infamously—Mitt Romney made a version of this argument in 2012, when he dismissed the 47 percent of the electorate that was “dependent upon government,” and “who pay no income tax,” and thus would never support him.

Creating a new class of “municipal voter” is asking for trouble. The city Board of Elections is notoriously clumsy and inefficient, and it must count itself lucky that New York City rarely has high turnout or close elections that would expose just how bad it really is at its job. Municipal elections are held in off years, so there would be no overlap with federal elections, but they would coincide with some state-level votes, and they could create the opportunity for fraud, or at least major confusion.