A condensed version of this post appears in the 24 January 2022 issue of The Buffalo News.

On Wednesday, 19 January 2022, Senate Republicans employed the filibuster to block legislation that would have restored provisions from the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 and made it easier for most voters to participate in elections, including by expanding early voting, same-day registration, and mail-in balloting. In a last-ditch effort to push the legislation through, Sen. Schumer (D-NY) moved to reform the filibuster to render it incapable of blocking bills that are supported by a 51-49 majority. That measure also failed, meaning that federal action to strengthen voting rights in 2022 looks to be a nonstarter.

As New York City (NYC) modeled last December, however, when the City Council established provisions granting non-citizens the right to participate in municipal elections if they meet residency requirements, local governments can step in to strengthen democracy where the federal government fails to do so.

NYC’s example is particularly instructive for places like Buffalo that benefit from large and growing immigrant populations. Indeed, while Buffalo celebrates its first-in-seven-decades population growth, which was ostensibly made possible by immigrants and refugees, it denies those residents the ability to participate in municipal elections to help shape the government of the City they are currently helping to revitalize. But this affront to the core democratic principle of being included in collective decisions that affect one’s life is not unchangeable – as our counterparts in NYC have so clearly demonstrated—nor has it always been standard practice.

For the first 150 years of U.S. history, immigrants in as many as 40 states and territories were capable of voting in American elections. Voting rights were predominantly tied to residency, not citizenship. Nonetheless, the institution of resident-based voting, which started out as common and noncontroversial, was steadily eroded, one state at a time, by nativist powerholders who increasingly perceived and framed immigrants as a collective threat to the status quo. By the end of World War I, citizenship requirements for voting had come to supplant resident-based voting almost everywhere on the map.

The reason that resident-based voting was able to occur in different states and times, and why it can still occur in places like NYC (effective next year), is that the U.S. Constitution does not preclude it. States and local governments decide who can and cannot vote in their elections. NYC’s experience shows that home rule cities in New York have the power to strengthen their local democracies by restoring immigrants’ rights to participate in municipal elections. Buffalo has an extraordinary opportunity to join NYC in establishing stronger voting rights at the local level, thereby prefiguring and setting an example for stronger democracy at the state and national levels.

To read more about resident-based voting rights and how they can be enacted in Buffalo, or to explore data on the size and geographies of Buffalo’s non-citizen voting-age population, check out Volume 2 Issue 4 of High Road Policy and its companion data portal.