In June, Burlington became the third Vermont city to allow foreign nationals to vote. It should come as no surprise that the home of socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders would sign off, and Vermont’s Democrat-controlled legislature would override liberal Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of Burlington’s charter change to let noncitizens cast ballots in local elections.
The leftists were overjoyed.
“We have a lot more immigrants and refugees, folks who’ve come here who don’t hold U.S. citizenship status, and they’ve been here for years,” Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, a Burlington Democrat and leader of the Vermont House Progressive Caucus, told Vermont Public Radio at the time.
Burlington changed its charter (and tweaked state law), giving the right to vote to any citizen or “legal resident” foreigner — someone “who resides in the United States on a permanent or indefinite basis in compliance with federal immigration laws,” according to the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.
Scott, a blue Republican governing arguably America’s bluest state, doesn’t have a problem with foreign nationals “calling Vermont home … participating in the issues affecting their communities,” according to Vermont Public Radio. He just doesn’t like the “patchwork of voting rules that enfranchise noncitizens in some towns, and deny them access to the ballot box in others.” He said it “creates separate and unequal classes of legal residents potentially eligible to vote on local voting issues.”
The Republican National Committee objected to watering down the idea that citizenship conveys the cherished right of voting.
