Legal permanent residents who have stayed in the area for 30 days.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: While District of Columbia council members voiced their support Wednesday for a new law that would allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, skeptics — including the head of the city’s election board — expressed concern over the logistics of expanding the franchise to Green Card-holders.
Under the measure introduced by Council member David Grosso (I-At Large) earlier this year, D.C. would join Takoma Park, Maryland and a small number of other jurisdictions that allow legal permanent residents to vote in local elections. Grosso’s bill would only require that those residents live in the city for 30 days before being able to cast ballots, according to the WAMU station of American University.
“They are our neighbors and our friends and they want to see our city flourish, yet they have no say in how the city’s government is run,” said Councilwoman Elissa Silverman, according to the Daily Caller.
Silverman went on to say that nearly one in eight D.C. citizens are immigrants, but only about 30 percent of them are American citizens, and that “all long-term residents of a city should have a right to have a choice in who represents them.”
“This speaks to the fundamental fairness and justice of our democracy, and in particular our local democracy,” Councilman Charles Allen added.
Dorothy Brizill, executive director of DCWatch– a government watchdog group — said that those who fought for years to get the right to vote in the civil rights movement are resentful, since they were already American citizens and still had to fight.
“For many the right to vote is the essence of citizenship,” she said as she warned the council not to pass the legislation.
Brizill also cited the difficulties that arise when non-citizens are given the right to vote, which would require two separate voter registrations for citizens and non-citizens.
“Would there be confusion at the polls?” Brizill asked of the council. “We’ve already seen confusion at the past.”
Brizill’s concerns were shared by Clifford Tatum, the head of the board, who said that allowing legal permanent residents to vote would create a number of “administrative and logistical hurdles.”
But Council member Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), which represents some of the neighborhoods where most of the city’s immigrants live, said that the challenges shouldn’t stop legislators from passing the bill, according to WAMU.
“We always have to be careful in government and to lead when we see obstacles and when we see bureaucratic hurdles, to make sure they are not what stands between us and doing the right thing for our residents,” she said.