52 Democrats join GOP as House votes to overturn D.C.’s noncitizen voting law

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The House delivered a bipartisan rebuke Thursday to the District of Columbia over its new law allowing noncitizens — including illegal immigrants — to cast ballots in local elections.

Republicans cast the vote as part of a broader attempt to defend citizenship against attempts to dilute its value and put citizens on par with temporary visitors and unauthorized migrants.

“Put citizenship back in its rightful place as the gold standard,” said Rep. August Pfluger, the Texas Republican who wrote the legislation.

The bill was approved on a 262-143 vote, with Democrats joining Republicans, underscoring the issue’s political potency.

Democrats who opposed the bill said Congress should have been tackling gun violence or a warming Earth rather than spending time meddling in the local affairs of the nation’s capital. One Democrat said he wouldn’t accept lectures about the importance of voting from Republicans who refused to certify the 2020 election results.

“It is hypocrisy we’re seeing here today in this debate,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat.

Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections, but some cities are experimenting with it for local contests.

The District’s policy is one of the most ambitious. It allows residents who have lived in the city for at least 30 days to register and cast ballots for mayor, city council, school and advisory commissions and other local elections.

That includes residents without any legal status. Republicans say it could even include agents of adversary nations, such as a spy working for the Russian Embassy.

The D.C. Council approved the noncitizen policy in late 2022 over Mayor Muriel Bowser’s opposition.

Given Democrats’ control of the Senate, the repeal bill passed Thursday is little more than political messaging.

Indeed, just minutes after the House approved the bill, the Senate voted on its own version of legislative messaging with a do-over vote on a bill that includes President Biden’s preferred border security changes.

Opposition was bipartisan, though for different reasons. Republicans said Mr. Biden’s border plan didn’t go far enough, and Democratic opponents said it went too far.

For the D.C. repeal bill, 52 Democrats joined Republicans.

That was 10 more Democrats than voted for a similar measure early last year, indicating a growing unease about noncitizen voting.

Noncitizen voting was standard practice in the country’s early days when states were far more heterogeneous in their rules on who qualified as a voter.

The practice faded over the 19th century and was effectively ended by the 20th century.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat, said most of the country didn’t see a need to bar noncitizens at the founding because it had other, tighter limits.

“The basic logic was if you are a White male property owner, it doesn’t make any difference what your citizenship is,” he said.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative in Congress, said the bill was an affront to democracy. She said the city’s council made its will known and it is “paternalistic” for Capitol Hill to intervene.

The vote is unlikely to cool the interest in noncitizen voting from liberal-leaning cities and towns where the idea is gaining adherents. Some allow illegal immigrants with tentative legal status to vote. The District’s more permissive plan applies to even short-term visitors and illegal immigrants.

Mr. Raskin, who led opposition to the bill, said he had seen no evidence of foreign adversaries voting and doubted illegal immigrants would register.

“It would, of course, be crazy for an undocumented person to attach their name to a public and transparent document like a voter registration document,” he said.

Other jurisdictions that allow noncitizen voting have generally reported low turnout from that population. The District is trying to reverse that trend by sending out instructions for voter registration.

Mr. Raskin said 512 noncitizens have registered, joining a voting population of roughly a half-million.

Rep. Clay Higgins, Louisiana Republican, said an estimated 50,000 noncitizens could register, and he figures many more will do so as elections approach.