RITE filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a Burlington charter amendment allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.
Vermont’s largest city is allowing noncitizens to vote in elections with statewide implications in violation of the state’s constitution, according to a lawsuit filed this week by two Burlington citizens who say their votes are being illegally diluted by foreigners.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday and backed by the Republican National Committee and the nonprofit Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, or RITE, is the latest effort from the Right to slow the spread of noncitizen voting in the Democrat-heavy towns and cities.
It comes while prominent personalities, including former president Donald Trump and Elon Musk, continue to warn that Democrats are “importing voters”— a charge that mainstream-media outlets and election officials say is overblown and a conspiracy theory aimed at sowing distrust ahead of the 2024 election.
Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in state or national elections, and there is little evidence that they do so illegally in large numbers. But over the last decade, more than a dozen towns and cities in blue states have opened the door to noncitizen voting in some local elections.
Proponents of noncitizen voting say that noncitizens who are legal residents have an interest in how their communities are run and should be allowed to vote in local elections.
But Derek Lyons, the president of RITE, said the noncitizen voting movement is aimed at weakening the notion of citizenship.
“This is an effort, ultimately, to normalize the practice whereby we extend that right to vote to anybody who claims an interest in that vote, and thereby undermining and diluting the say and power of citizens,” he said in an interview with National Review.
The lawsuit against the city of Burlington is narrowly aimed at noncitizen voting in school board and budget elections. The RNC and RITE say those elections have implications for taxpayers across Vermont, where almost all school funding comes from the state.
“We won’t be challenging the election of the dog catcher in Burlington,” said Brady Toensing, one of the lawyers behind the lawsuit.
The lawsuit stems from a change to the Burlington charter, which voters approved in March 2023, allowing noncitizens who are legal residents of the city to vote in municipal elections, including school-district elections. Vermont’s General Assembly approved the amendment, and then overrode a veto from governor Phil Scott, a Republican.
Burlington was the third Vermont city to approve noncitizen voting, behind Montpelier in 2018 and Winooski in 2020. The RNC filed legal challenges in those cases as well.
The Vermont constitution establishes citizenship as a requirement for voting on “freemen” issues, which include “any matter that concerns” the state, according to the lawsuit against Burlington.
In a January ruling in the Montpelier challenge, the Vermont Supreme Court held that the state constitution doesn’t bar noncitizens from voting in purely local elections where there is no statewide concern. However, the court noted that a “vote municipal in name, but traditionally the province of ‘freemen’ in substance, could not avoid the [citizenship] requirement.”
The plaintiffs targeting noncitizen voting in Burlington contend that school budget issues present something of a hybrid situation — the local school boards craft the budget, which is approved by local voters but is then mostly paid by state tax dollars. That means that votes by noncitizens could have implications for taxpayers throughout Vermont.
“Therefore,” Lyons said, “their pocket is going to be affected, their taxes, which is to say their property, will be affected by what the people of Burlington, including now non-citizens, do. So, it becomes a statewide issue.”
And those school budgets are costly. The General Assembly recently approved a 14 percent property-tax increase, and overrode a Scott veto, due largely to ballooning school costs.
“These school budget votes, and the school board votes, which put together the school budgets, because they’re paid for out of state funds by operation of law, that’s a freeman issue and that’s subject to the constitution,” Toensing said.
Ben Traverse, the president of Burlington’s city council, said in an email that he’s concerned about “outside special interest groups, backed by dark money, trying to drive policy changes through our courts.”
He also defended the city’s voting measures, saying that allowing noncitizens to vote in their local elections doesn’t violate the constitution.
“Burlington voters overwhelmingly supported all legal residents having the opportunity to vote in our local elections,” he wrote. “These residents drive the same roads, walk the same sidewalks, drink the same water, use the same parks, and send their kids to the same schools as their citizen neighbors, and Burlingtonians felt they deserved the opportunity [to] weigh-in on the future of our community.”
Lyons said that just because noncitizens have an interest in how the city is run, that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to vote. Children, people who are mentally incapacitated, and Burlington property owners and business owners who reside outside the city have an interest in the city’s operations as well, but they can’t vote in the local elections.
“For a country that is founded on a principle of self-government, the question is, what is the self that is doing the governing? That self is citizens and not foreigners,” he said.
While Trump, Musk, and others have expressed concerns about noncitizens voting in federal elections, the Burlington lawsuit does not address that. In April, a Cato Institute fellow called those broader concerns “bogus.”
Local elections in Burlington are typically held in March, while federal elections are in November. Lyons said he’s not aware of any issues in Vermont of noncitizen voting “bleeding over into elections where it shouldn’t be happening.” But he suggested that normalizing noncitizen voting locally could lead to efforts down the road to expand it.
In addition to the three Vermont cities, San Francisco and Oakland allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections, and Washington D.C. and eleven cities and towns in Maryland allow them to vote in some municipal elections.
In February, a New York state appeals court ruled that a law allowing noncitizens in New York City to vote in local elections was unconstitutional.