This story by Liberty Darr was first published in the Other Paper on May 22.
The City of South Burlington is pausing its effort to expand local voting rights to all legal residents.
All resident voting would allow all the city’s legal residents, including those who are noncitizens, to vote in local elections and other supplementary school or city votes. The idea was first brought to the city council by the city’s Democratic committee last September with the hopes of having it placed on this year’s Town Meeting Day ballot. Since this would require a charter change, the city must bring the question to the voters for approval.
While the committee at the time said it needed more time to study the issue, its final report recommended against moving forward at this time.
Even the charter committee’s own members were split 4-3 on the decision. Committee members opposed to the expansion said, given the tense political climate, enabling people to put their names on a public list of legal non-citizens could make those people targets of federal retaliation, they said.
They also said that, in this hostile environment, the committee would be unable to obtain useful information from the relevant South Burlington community to help them understand whether legal residents even want this change.
“I immediately made the motion that we should put this thing in the freezer and wait, for humanitarian reasons,” Wendell Coleman, a member of the charter committee, told city council Monday.
Anne LaLonde, another member of the committee, offered a different perspective.
“This definitely, clearly comes from a place of empathy, and I understand that it’s a frightening time for noncitizens in the United States, whether you have a green card, whether you don’t, I think that’s a completely valid point of view,” she said. “But I would say I think legal residents of South Burlington should be able to choose for themselves whether or not to register to vote.”
In the report, they listed an executive order by President Donald Trump that among other things, directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to “ensure that state and local officials have access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered” and to “take all lawful and appropriate action to make available information from relevant databases to state and local election officials engaged in verifying the citizenship of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.”
Committee members say it is unclear whether registered local non-citizen voters would be in Vermont’s database or in Vermont’s “publicly available voter registration list,” creating safety concerns for some residents.
Other pending federal legislation would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in elections for federal office. And it remains murky what exactly that means for local elections, the committee wrote in its report.
Three Vermont cities — Winooski, Montpelier and Burlington — have already allowed voting for all legal residents.
All three cities have been challenged in court and upheld, but plaintiffs in the Burlington case have recently filed an appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court. That case is still ongoing.
The committee undertook a series of public outreach initiatives, interviewing the clerks in each of the three cities and reaching out to several community groups to gauge feedback on how this topic would be received by legal permanent residents or new naturalized citizens.
While council chair Tim Barritt had more of an appetite to continue the work now, other members of the council concurred with the committee’s recommendation. Aside from all councilors holding the moral standpoint that those who pay taxes should be able to vote on issues that pertain to the city, from a practical standpoint, the issue could prove difficult.
“I think before we proceed, we need to have some confidence that the runway is not a very long runway, but a runway that actually is a genuine question that people should put thought to and make a decision,” councilor Mike Scanlan said.
Before the vote to conclude the discussion, the committee had talked about continuing outreach to community groups and impacted community members and if the city council takes this issue up in the future, it could build off the plan to do community outreach to obtain more information and learn more about public opinion.
“I’m full steam ahead,” Barritt said. “We’re operating out of fear for these individuals who might want to vote, and I understand that, but there almost is never a good time, so to speak, when you have situations like this, and we don’t know what’s going to unfold.”
