A New York City law that would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections was declared unconstitutional on Thursday by the state’s highest court, which overwhelmingly upheld a lower-court ruling, The New York Times reports. The law, which was passed in 2021 but never went into effect, would have given the city’s roughly 800,000 green-card holders more of a say in the governance of their home, as long as they had lived in New York for 30 days. But The New York State Court of Appeals ruled that citizenship was a constitutional condition of voter eligibility.
Writing for the 6-1 majority, Rowan D. Wilson, chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, concluded that the State Constitution made citizenship a condition of voting. Lawyers for the City of New York and an immigrant civil rights group, which had appealed the lower-court rulings, had argued that the State Constitution was more expansive in who had the right to vote. The voting measure, known as Local Law 11, was passed by the City Council toward the end of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s second and last term. Mr. de Blasio and his successor, Mr. Adams, questioned the Council’s constitutional authority to pass the measure, but neither chose to sign or veto it — allowing it to become law. But it was soon challenged.
תגובות