Will DC Circuit Let Aliens Vote in American Elections?

August 27, 2024

DC citizens show court noncitizen voting law is unconstitutional

WASHINGTON—Representing DC politician Stacia Hall and six other U.S. citizens registered to vote in the District of Columbia, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) has filed its opening brief in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering plaintiffs’ case against DC’s law allowing noncitizens—including illegal aliens—to vote in local DC elections.

Previously, in a brief and flawed order, a lower federal court had dismissed the case for lack of standing. Ignoring plaintiffs’ claims that their right to citizen self-government, and to vote in an election in which only citizens vote, would be violated by DC’s law, that court claimed that plaintiffs would not even be injured by the law, because their votes would be counted equally with those of the new noncitizen voters.

As plaintiffs show in their brief on appeal, that argument has absurd consequences. According to the lower court’s logic, DC could, for example, pass a law explicitly adding white (and only white) persons living outside of DC to the voter rolls in DC, and no black voter in DC would be injured on grounds of racial vote dilution, since their votes would be counted equally with the added whites’ votes. In reality, of course, such a racially-discriminatory expansion of the franchise would be illegal on its face, and those whose rights were violated by it would clearly suffer an injury and have standing to sue.

It is the same here. If plaintiffs have a right to citizen self-government that will be violated by DC’s law, they will be injured when their votes are diluted by those of noncitizen voters. In deciding standing, the court must assume that this claimed right exists, and should find that, if it exists, plaintiffs’ own rights to citizen self-government will be violated by voting in an election alongside noncitizens.

Indeed, plaintiffs argue, the court should not only assume that the right to citizen self-government exists, but reach the obvious conclusion that it does, in fact, exist, and thus decide the merits of this case. Voting is part of self-government, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that citizens have a right to be governed by their citizen peers, that noncitizens are by definition outside of our political community, and that the right to govern is reserved to citizens. These rights flow from the sovereignty of the American people—that is, American citizens—over all of this country.

“’We the People’ established the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “That means the people are sovereign, and laws like DC’s that diminish that sovereignty violate the Constitution. We hope the court not only sees that our clients will be injured by DC’s law, but reaches the merits of this case to find that law unconstitutional, and strikes it down.”

The case is Hall v. DC Board of Elections, No. 24-7050 (DC Circuit).