After two failed attempts in 2015 and 2020, a group of Burlington city councilors are again pushing to expand voting rights to include legal residents of the city who aren’t citizens.
The council’s charter change committee discussed the long-contemplated initiative when it met Thursday.
“There’s a general sense that the decisions we make as a city impact all of our residents equally regardless of whether you’re a United States citizen or not,” Ben Traverse, a Democratic city councilor and member of the charter change committee, said in an interview Friday.
“I think more of our residents should have a say in the future of our city,” Traverse said, explaining his support for allowing noncitizen legal residents of Burlington to vote in local elections. (They would still be barred from participating in state and federal elections.)
Councilors previously proposed the measure in 2015, but Burlington voters rejected it at the polls. Another attempt in 2020 met with even less success. After initially voting to put the question to residents again, the council backtracked, sending it back to the charter change committee.
That committee has gone back to the drawing board and is now working to reexamine the issue and voters’ concerns. According to Traverse, the idea of pushing for voting rights for Burlington’s non-citizen legal residents has been at the forefront of the committee’s priorities for some months.
Traverse said the committee has already drafted the language of the proposed charter change. This time around, it’s focusing on addressing community concerns and building support among the city’s residents.
“We want to spend the next few months engaging the public and engaging the community,” Traverse said, including making sure everyone who has questions or concerns gets them answered.
Before bringing the issue to the full council, the committee is pushing forward with community engagement. It is working with the city’s Community and Economic Development Office and its Trusted Community Voices program, which seeks to improve community engagement with a focus on immigrant and refugee communities. Traverse said they have identified the next steps as developing a list of frequently asked questions and their answers, creating videos that inform marginalized communities and encourage voter participation and “providing translations where necessary.”
Traverse said he thinks the 2015 effort failed due to lack of public involvement and transparency in the process.
The committee aims to get the initiative on the ballot for Town Meeting Day in March. Traverse says the committee is not aiming for the November election because these things take time to do correctly, and educating the public is the priority right now. This go-round, the committee is approaching the initiative more methodically, he said, especially as tensions rise in the country and voting rights are under attack.
Similar initiatives have passed in Montpelier and Winooski, but not without obstacles. Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the bills after the Legislature passed them. Lawmakers then voted to override Scott’s vetoes with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate.
Now, Montpelier and Winooski, the state capital and the state’s most diverse city, respectively, are facing lawsuits filed by the Republican National Committee and the Vermont Republican Party, arguing that the cities are violating the state constitution by allowing noncitizens to vote.
“I give a lot of credit to Montpelier and Winooski for really taking a leap of faith on this and forging a way,” Traverse said.
Even if Burlington voters pass the measure, it likely would face similar challenges down the road.
“The reality here is that, regardless of whether we pass it or not in November or in March as a charter change, it has to go to the Legislature for approval,” Traverse said. “Any charter change we pass would not go into effect until after, hopefully, the Legislature signs off on it, and the governor enacts it.”
