The new law in New York City allowing noncitizens to vote is not merely a logical absurdity and an affront to citizenship itself — it also appears to be racist.
That is the contention, both practical and legal, of a lawsuit against the new ordinance filed Feb. 2 by four black New York citizens. The lawsuit’s contentions are far from implausible. And the suit provides a well-merited comeuppance for the usual purveyors of racial identity politics. It does so by destroying the offensive assumption that any skin pigment darker than pale automatically creates a political alliance.
The four black plaintiffs, whose political views appear to range all over the ideological spectrum, argue that the ordinance violates the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (It arguably violates several federal and New York state legal provisions as well, but they aren’t the major focus of this suit.) The amendment’s main clause says simply that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The suit notes, indisputably, that the ordinance allowing noncitizens (the vast majority of whom are nonblack) to vote will dilute or “abridge” the voting power of black New York citizens as a class. This, the lawsuit says, is both the practical effect and the deliberate intent of the ordinance’s sponsors.
City Council ordinance sponsor Ydanis Rodriguez made the racial intent clear numerous times during debate over the bill, speaking in Spanish while specifically saying the new law would increase the power of Hispanics and Asians. And, quite explicitly: “This city has changed the color of the skin of people coming to this city, then we change it who will be voting in this city.”
Even though council President Laurie Cumbo and another black council colleague specifically raised concerns about the effects on “African American communities” and complained that “our vote and our voices are being eroded,” the council passed the bill (as the lawsuit says) “without any investigation whatsoever on the negative impact on black voters in New York City.”
Substantial case law from both the U.S. Supreme Court and from numerous other courts, including a case from the U.S. territory of Guam as recently as 2019, has affirmed this lawsuit’s contention that “if race played any role at all in the enactment of the election procedure, the procedure violates the Fifteenth Amendment,” which “dooms” it constitutionally.
As the plaintiffs note, Hispanics and blacks do not vote at anywhere near the same percentages for the same candidates, with Hispanic New Yorkers in 2020 being far more likely than black New Yorkers to vote for then-President Donald Trump.
This ought to convince the courts to invalidate New York’s noncitizen voting law. Then again, even apart from its dubious constitutionality, the law should be thrown out. On its own terms, a Chinese citizen working in New York for a company that is a direct subsidiary of the Communist Chinese government is now allowed to vote in city elections. So, probably, is a diplomat serving Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
The law discriminates against citizens, period. That’s terrible enough. As this lawsuit makes clear, it also deliberately abridges the voting rights of black citizens whose rights the Constitution specifically secures.
