The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-5 this week to place a measure on the November ballot that would allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. The voters who already decide elections in Los Angeles have presided over a city that watched itself burn, cannot house its own residents, is losing citizens by the thousands annually, and had a mayor who was out of the country during one of the worst wildfire disasters in city history. Their solution is to find new voters.
That's not democracy. That's a Ponzi scheme with ballots.
The proposal would extend voting rights in local races — including school board elections — to holders of DACA status, Temporary Protected Status, and legal permanent residents. Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, who authored the measure, framed it this way: "It just does not make sense to me that someone who moves to Los Angeles for a temporary job has more of a voice than a parent who has been here for decades, raising their children through our public schools."
The argument sounds sympathetic on first read. Look closer and it falls apart.
Soto-Martinez is describing a real disparity: a citizen who arrives in LA temporarily can vote; a non-citizen who has lived there for decades cannot. His proposed solution is to remove citizenship as the requirement. But the disparity he's describing already has a solution: naturalization. Legal permanent residents — the primary group this measure targets — become eligible for U.S. citizenship after five years of residence, three if married to a citizen. Someone who has lived in Los Angeles for decades as a legal permanent resident has had multiple opportunities to pursue citizenship and has not done so. That is a choice, and civic choices have political consequences.
Follow Soto-Martinez's logic to its conclusion and citizenship becomes meaningless as a category. If decades of residence without naturalization earns you a ballot, what exactly is citizenship for? The people who went through the process — who filed the paperwork, passed the civics exam, appeared before an immigration officer, and took the oath — will now share their school board vote with people who explicitly chose not to. That is not expanding representation. It is diluting the votes of people who made the formal commitment this country asks for.
Los Angeles is a city where governance failures have been severe enough to drive its own citizens out. The population has declined. The homeless crisis is visible from every freeway. The infrastructure cannot keep pace with basic demands. The democratic response to that record is accountability — citizens holding officials responsible for results. What Soto-Martinez is proposing is a different approach entirely: when your existing electorate becomes dissatisfied and starts leaving, expand the electorate.
This measure still has to pass with LA voters in November, which means the citizens of Los Angeles will literally be voting on whether to make their own votes worth less. They should understand exactly what's being asked of them.
We fought a revolution over the principle that citizens govern themselves. Los Angeles is asking its citizens to vote on whether that principle still applies.