Who Votes Now? LA Drops The Guardrails

A person casting their vote at a polling station

A new Los Angeles plan to let noncitizens vote in city and school elections is taking direct aim at the meaning of American citizenship.

Story Snapshot

Los Angeles City Council advanced a charter change that could let noncitizens vote in city and school board races.
The measure would give the council new power to create a separate “residential voting” system for foreign nationals.
Supporters claim tax‑paying noncitizens deserve a voice; critics warn this guts the value of U.S. citizenship.
The rules for who can vote and how the system would be run are still undefined, raising election‑integrity concerns.

City Council Moves to Redefine Who Counts as a Voter

The Los Angeles City Council has taken a formal step toward letting noncitizens vote in local elections, putting a charter amendment on the November 3 ballot that would empower the council to approve a law granting foreign nationals the right to cast ballots in citywide and Los Angeles Unified School District elections.^[1] The proposal, pushed by Councilmember Hugo Soto‑Martínez, passed on a 10–5 vote as part of a broader package that also seeks more council control over the Los Angeles Police Department, signaling an aggressive shift in how power is distributed in the city.^[1]

Under the current city charter, voters in Los Angeles city elections must meet the same basic requirements as in California statewide contests, including being a United States citizen.^[9] The new measure would carve out an exception, allowing the council to design a separate “residential voting program” for people who are not citizens but live in the city and meet future criteria.^[3] Supporters describe this as expanding democracy, but for many Americans it looks like the city is rewriting the social contract without fixing crime, homelessness, or costs of living first.

How the Noncitizen Voting Plan Would Work — Eventually

If voters approve the charter change this fall, noncitizens will not start voting the next day; instead, the council will gain the authority to pass an ordinance later that spells out who qualifies and how they register and vote.^[1] Reporting from Los Angeles outlets makes clear that these rules “have yet to be determined,” and options mentioned include lawful permanent residents with green cards, recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and other noncitizens who live and work in the city.^[3] That means Angelenos are being asked to sign a blank check on the most basic rule of self‑government: who chooses their leaders.

The charter measure would limit expanded voting to races for mayor, city council, and the Los Angeles Board of Education, not county, state, or federal elections.^[3] Federal law still bars noncitizens from voting in federal races like president or Congress, but states and cities are left to draw their own lines in local contests, which is why Los Angeles progressives see an opening.^[4] Conservatives across the country worry that once one of America’s largest cities normalizes noncitizen voting, activists will push to copy the model elsewhere and test the limits of state and federal protections.

Supporters’ “Tax and Representation” Argument Versus Citizenship

Backers of the Los Angeles proposal insist that noncitizens already contribute to the city’s economy, pay taxes, send kids to public schools, and follow local rules, so they deserve a say in who runs city hall and the school district.^[3] Councilmember Soto‑Martínez has framed the issue in simple terms: if you are contributing to the economy, you should help decide who represents you.^[11] Immigration and voting‑rights activists also point to other cities such as Takoma Park, San Francisco, and some Vermont municipalities that have allowed noncitizen voting in limited local elections in recent decades.^[10]

Opponents answer with an equally simple principle: voting is a core benefit and duty of citizenship, not just of residency.^[3] A spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform stressed that lawful status before naturalization is supposed to be a probationary period, after which a person can swear an oath and join the political community as a full citizen.^[6] To critics, letting people bypass that step and still vote chips away at the incentive to become American in more than name only, and blurs the line between citizens and noncitizens at the ballot box in a way the founders never intended.

Election Integrity, Legal Fights, and the Bigger National Pattern

Practical questions about election integrity hang over the plan, even before politics enters the picture. The city has not released a full framework for how a noncitizen voter list would be built, how identities would be checked, or how local ballots would be kept separate from county, state, and federal contests to avoid illegal crossover voting.^[3] The measure’s own supporters admit the details of the residential voting program — from eligibility to privacy protections — would all be worked out later by ordinance, which heightens fears of loopholes, bureaucracy, and partisan games once the gate is open.^[5]

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Across the country, fights over noncitizen voting have become more intense as immigration, border security, and trust in elections collide. Ballotpedia records that in 2024, voters in eight states approved constitutional amendments that explicitly ban noncitizen voting, and in 2025 Texas voters added another such restriction, reflecting a growing backlash.^[10] Courts have also stepped in: a New York appeals court struck down that city’s local noncitizen voting law as violating the state constitution, showing that even if federal law allows local experiments, state charters can still block them.^[10]