The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate ’that they have personally been subjected to any sort of disadvantage as individual voters,’ the judge said.
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging a Washington, D.C., law allowing “noncitizen residents” to vote in local elections.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that a group of seven citizen plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the legislation.
Their lawsuit against the D.C. Board of Elections, filed on March 14, aimed to block the 2022 law passed by the Council of the District of Columbia.
They argued that “noncitizens” do not have a fundamental right to vote in the United States and that allowing them to cast ballots and hold office in the District of Columbia dilutes the votes of U.S. citizens.
“It follows from our national independence that United States citizens have a right to govern, and be governed by, themselves. The constitutional right to citizen self-government, moreover, has been recognized in repeated holdings of the Supreme Court of the United States,” their complaint reads.
“Nor does any noncitizen have a constitutional right to govern the United States,” the complaint adds.
The group argued that the Supreme Court has recognized and protected these rights against infringement in “multiple precedents.”
The group, in their complaint, argued that vote dilution caused by expanding the franchise to illegal immigrants has been analyzed under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment “on the ground that they discriminate against an identifiable group by harming that group while benefitting another.”
And while the complaint noted that the 14th Amendment only applies to the states, they contended that the 5th Amendment due process clause grants residents of the District of Columbia the same equal protection right.
No Standing
However, in an opinion issued Thursday, Judge Jackson determined that the seven plaintiffs failed to demonstrate “that they have personally been subjected to any sort of disadvantage as individual voters by virtue of the fact that noncitizens are permitted to vote, too.”
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