Recently, the New York City Council passed a law allowing permanent residents and those with DACA status to vote in local elections. This move comes amid a nationwide push to expressly forbid all noncitizen voting, even in states that don’t allow it. For example, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) circulated a petition for a state amendment banning noncitizen voting in Georgia. In 2020, Colorado, Florida and Alabama approved similar state amendments.
Both approaches may come as a surprise to Americans who assume that our system has explicitly defined who may vote. But it hasn’t.
The Constitution does not define voting as a right, and who possesses this privilege has been fluid throughout American history. Politicians have long enfranchised — or disfranchised — groups to benefit those already in power. That includes immigrants. While federal law since 1996 requires voters in federal elections to be citizens, state and local governments can enfranchise noncitizens in their elections, and our nation has a long history of granting noncitizens voting rights. Approximately two-thirds of the nation, in fact, allowed noncitizens to vote at some point in their territorial or state history, though the practice became curtailed after 1926.
Efforts to limit voting rights, including those for noncitizen immigrants, have always been about reshaping the electorate as politicians see fit — choosing one’s voters — to serve particular beliefs about belonging and exclusion, in the absence of a truly representative system.
The founding generation, acting through the Confederation Congress, which governed the United States from 1781 to 1789, enfranchised immigrants in the Northwest Territory, the area west of Pennsylvania and east of the Mississippi River, for example. Noncitizen voting attracted immigrants by giving them a say in the government, and those in power saw it as training them for full citizenship.
In the Early Republic, many states and territories allowed “declarant immigrants” — those who had filed their intentions to become citizens — to vote. Under federal law, White, male immigrants who had resided in the nation for five years could naturalize as U.S. citizens three years after filing their intention to do so; allowing declarant immigrants to vote meant adding more White men to the rolls.
Then, amid the democratization of the nation in the 1820s, many states eliminated property requirements for White male voters, while erecting new barriers to political participation for women and people of color. A push to end immigrant voting was part of this restructuring of the boundaries of political rights, preserving the ballot for native-born White men amid increasing numbers of German and Irish immigrants.