New York City Lawmakers Pass Bill Letting Some Noncitizens Vote

Mayor

Bill de Blasio

said he wouldn’t veto the legislation but didn’t commit to signing it before he leaves office at the end of this month. A bill becomes law if the mayor doesn’t sign or veto it within 30 days of passage.

New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat from upper Manhattan who immigrated to the city from the Dominican Republic, said his personal history informed the legislation. He wondered why, as a teacher working with a green card, he would pay taxes but not be granted a say in municipal-spending decisions.

“I believe that my contributions were equal before and after I became a U.S. citizen,” he said.

The measure would let lawful permanent residents or those authorized to work in the U.S. to vote in city elections if they have lived in the five boroughs for 30 days or more and meet the other requirements for voting. It wouldn’t grant voting rights to immigrants who entered the country illegally.

About 10% of the city’s 8.4 million inhabitants have status as lawful permanent residents, mostly with green cards, according to an April report by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. There were an estimated 476,000 undocumented immigrants in the city in 2019, the report said. The top countries of origin for foreign-born New Yorkers are the Dominican Republic, China and Jamaica, the report said.

The New York Immigration Coalition has pushed for the enactment of such a law for more than 10 years and hoped its passage in New York would spark more action around the country, said

Anu Joshi,

the advocacy group’s vice president of policy.

A smattering of other municipalities currently allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, Ms. Joshi said. They include Takoma Park, a Maryland city that borders Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, which allows residents to cast ballots in school-board elections regardless of their citizenship status.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat whose advisers say is considering a run for governor, said he wouldn’t veto the legislation if it reached his desk but that he had concerns about its legality.

“In the end, I want to make sure that citizenship, which people work so hard to achieve, is valued and is given its full weight,” the mayor said in late November during an interview on NY1.

The New York state Constitution says that all citizens over age 18 shall be eligible to vote, but, Mr. Rodriguez said, it doesn’t say anything that would prohibit noncitizens from gaining access to the ballot box in local elections.

City Councilman Joseph Borelli, a Republican from Staten Island, said he would vote against the measure. He said that he believed the state constitution would need to be amended for the measure to be enacted and that it would be challenged in court. He said noncitizens in New York weren’t disenfranchised because they were eligible to vote in other countries, noting that candidates for office in places like the Dominican Republic come to New York to campaign for votes.

“I think there’s a number of people looking at lawsuits,” Mr. Borelli said.

Write to Jimmy Vielkind at Jimmy.Vielkind@wsj.com