A Los Angeles Democrat is floating a plan to let foreign nationals vote in local elections, a move that critics say would undermine the integrity of the electoral process. The push mirrors a New York City experiment already struck down as unconstitutional by that state's highest court.
Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez put forward the proposal, which would place a question on the November election ballot asking Angelenos whether the Los Angeles City Charter should be amended to give the council authority to pursue a noncitizen voting plan, Breitbart News reported.
The measure still has to clear the council's rule committee and then win approval from the full city council before it reaches voters. But the intent is plain: open a path for people who are not American citizens to cast ballots in the second-largest city in the country.
Soto-Martinez has framed the initiative in carefully limited language. Speaking to local media, the councilman described the ballot question this way:
"It just says, 'Should we amend the city charter to allow the city council to explore this in the future.'"
That framing deserves a closer look. The measure would not, by itself, hand noncitizens the franchise. What it would do is remove a structural barrier inside the city charter so that the council could later pass its own plan, with fewer obstacles and less public scrutiny, to extend voting rights to foreign nationals in Los Angeles city elections.
In other words, the ballot question is a permission slip. Voters would be asked to unlock the door. The council would decide later how wide to swing it open.
That two-step design matters. It lets proponents tell skeptics the measure is modest, just an exploration, while building the legal and political infrastructure to deliver noncitizen voting without a second trip to the ballot box. If the charter amendment passes, the council could act on its own timeline, under its own terms.
Los Angeles is not the first major city to pursue this idea. Democrats on the New York City Council pushed a similar plan to open city elections to foreign nationals. The effort advanced, and then collapsed in court.
The State of New York Court of Appeals ruled last year that the New York City plan was unconstitutional. The court's language left little room for ambiguity. Its decision, as quoted in reporting on the matter, stated that the state constitution "makes clear what our case law has long held: Article II, section 1 restricts voting to citizens."
That ruling did not hinge on a technicality. It rested on a bedrock constitutional principle: in New York, only citizens may vote. The court treated the question as settled law, not a close call.
The obvious question for Los Angeles is whether California's legal framework would produce a different result. The fact pack does not identify any California constitutional provision or court precedent that would clearly permit what New York's highest court rejected. Soto-Martinez's proposal appears to proceed as though the legal landscape is friendlier in California, but that assumption has not been tested.
The push to extend voting rights to noncitizens in local elections is not an isolated experiment. It fits a pattern of progressive municipal governments seeking to blur the line between citizens and non-citizens in the democratic process. The argument from proponents typically rests on the idea that people who live in a city, pay taxes, and send children to local schools should have a say in local governance regardless of citizenship status.
That argument sounds reasonable on the surface. But it collides with a principle most Americans still hold: voting is a right of citizenship, not residency. The distinction is not arbitrary. Citizenship carries obligations, allegiance, jury duty, military service eligibility, that residency alone does not. Voting is the reward for accepting those obligations and the legal bond they represent.
The concern is not hypothetical. Across the country, documented cases of noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections have surfaced repeatedly, raising questions about whether existing safeguards are adequate even before cities begin formally inviting noncitizen participation.
Proponents insist that local elections are different, that letting noncitizens vote for city council or school board does not threaten federal or state election integrity. But once the infrastructure exists to register noncitizen voters and place them on rolls, the risk of those voters appearing on state and federal ballots, whether by error or design, increases. Election administration is messy. Databases talk to each other. Mistakes compound.
Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Violations carry serious penalties. Just this year, four noncitizens faced federal charges for illegally voting in New Jersey elections, a reminder that the law treats this conduct as a crime, not a policy disagreement.
Those cases are not outliers. In Kansas, a former mayor who was a Mexican national on a green card pleaded guilty to voting illegally in multiple elections, a case that drew national attention precisely because the offender held public office while lacking the citizenship required to cast the ballots that helped put him there. That guilty plea illustrated how noncitizen voting can move from an abstract policy debate to a concrete breach of public trust.
Enforcement actions have also reached the state level. In Minnesota, a noncitizen faced felony charges after voting in the 2024 election, underscoring that prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions treat this as a serious offense. That case is still working through the courts.
Against this backdrop, the Los Angeles proposal raises a structural question: if the city formally creates a class of noncitizen voters for local elections, how does it prevent those same individuals from ending up on state and federal rolls? The proposal, as described, does not appear to address that problem. Soto-Martinez's public comments focused on the narrow scope of the ballot question, not on the downstream administrative challenges.
The measure is far from a done deal. It must first pass the council's rule committee. Then it goes to the full Los Angeles City Council for a vote. Only if the council approves does the question land on the November ballot for voters to decide.
Each of those steps offers an opportunity for opposition, or for quiet approval. Los Angeles city politics skew heavily Democratic, and the council has shown little appetite in recent years for resisting progressive policy experiments. Whether enough members see political risk in attaching their names to a noncitizen voting measure remains to be seen.
The November timeline adds another layer. Placing the question on a general election ballot, when turnout is highest and the electorate is broadest, could cut either way. Proponents may hope the measure gets lost in the noise of a crowded ballot. Opponents may see it as a galvanizing issue for voters who believe citizenship should remain the threshold for the franchise.
The New York Court of Appeals ruling stands as the most direct legal precedent on this question. The court did not merely find a procedural flaw in the New York City Council's approach. It held that the state constitution reserves voting for citizens, full stop.
California's constitution contains its own provisions on voter eligibility. Whether those provisions would be interpreted the same way is an open question. But the New York ruling signals that courts are willing to enforce the citizenship requirement when challenged, and that municipal governments cannot simply legislate around it.
Soto-Martinez's two-step approach, ballot question first, council action later, may be designed in part to delay that legal confrontation. If voters approve the charter amendment, the council could take years to develop a specific plan, pushing any court challenge further into the future. By then, proponents may hope, the political and legal ground will have shifted.
That is a strategy, not a safeguard.
Los Angeles is a city of nearly four million people. Its elections shape policy on policing, housing, homelessness, and public safety, issues that affect every resident. The question is not whether noncitizens are affected by those policies. They plainly are. The question is whether the right to choose the officials who make those policies should be reserved for the people who have made the full legal commitment to this country.
New York's highest court answered that question clearly. Los Angeles Democrats appear determined to ask it again.
When a city starts treating citizenship as optional for voting, it has not expanded democracy. It has diluted it.
