Two Burlington residents backed by a national conservative group are suing the city of Burlington over a recent charter change allowing noncitizen voting in local elections.
The nonprofit group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Chittenden Superior civil court on behalf of Karen Rowell and Michele Morin, two Burlington residents who say they are “being denied their right to live in a state governed by its citizens,” according to a press release issued by the group.
Local voters approved Burlington’s charter change in 2023, and the Vermont Legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Phil Scott to enact it several months later. It allows noncitizen, legal residents — green card holders, residents with eligible work permits, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, for example — the right to vote in local government and school elections.
The lawsuit claims that allowing noncitizens to vote violates Section 42 of the Vermont Constitution, which establishes United States citizenship as a requirement for voting on “freemen” issues. The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to stop the city “from implementing the invalid voting scheme” and registering noncitizens to vote.
“Activists are working overtime to undermine democracy in Vermont by extending the right to vote to noncitizens,” Derek Lyons, RITE’s president, said in the press release. “The non-citizen voting movement achieves the left’s goal of legalizing foreign interference in American elections. It threatens the rule of law and must be stopped before it further infects Vermont and other states in this country.”
A spokesperson for Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the city could not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Although noncitizen voting is not allowed in federal elections, municipalities in several states — Vermont, Maryland and California — as well as the District of Columbia have voted to allow it in local elections, according to Ballotpedia. Seven states prohibit the practice.
Two years before Burlington approved its measure, Winooski and Montpelier passed similar charter changes.
The national and state branches of the Republican Party sued both of those cities over the issue in 2021, alleging that their noncitizen voting measures were unconstitutional, but the lawsuits were eventually tossed.
In January 2023, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld a 2022 Washington Superior civil court decision to dismiss the suit against Montpelier.
The state’s highest court ruled that the city’s charter provision did not violate the state’s constitution because Section 42’s requirement that a person must be a U.S. citizen in order to be considered “a voter of this state” applies only to statewide elections, and not to local elections in all cases.
Winooski was sued a second time by the Vermont Republican Party and its national counterpart in March 2023 — although that suit was also thrown out by a superior court judge.
In each case, Brady Toensing, a former vice chair of the state GOP who served in former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, argued that voting on local school budgets brought a different set of considerations to bear because Vermont’s education system is funded through a broader statewide fund.
Toensing, who authored the latest lawsuit against Burlington, offered the same argument.
“The charter amendment authorizes noncitizen voting in these elections, even though school budget issues clearly have statewide implications and are thus reserved for United States citizens alone,” he wrote.
RITE was first launched in July 2022 by prominent Republican figures, including Karl Rove and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, to defend state legislatures’ right to set election laws, according to reporting from Reuters.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawsuit backed by conservative group challenges noncitizen voting in Burlington.