Valdosta Daily Times. June 3, 2024.
Editorial: Constitution change not needed to keep non-citizens from voting
Last week, a survey arrived in the mail from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s organization, Integrity Works for Georgia Action, Inc. It was one more effort to drum up support for what’s become Raffensperger’s signature pursuit: A constitutional amendment banning non-citizens from voting.
On the face of it, the secretary of state seems to have the right philosophy: The right to vote is a fundamental function of citizenship in a republic. If a non-citizen can perform the fundamental functions of a citizen, then what exactly is the difference between the two?
But this also seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Federal law prevents non-citizens voting in federal elections ( Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 ).
Georgia law prevents them from voting in state or local elections ( Official Code of Georgia § 21-2-216 ).
Based on information from Ballotpedia.com, no state allows non-citizens to vote in state elections — but some do allow cities to set their own rules for municipal voting and some of those cities have allowed non-citizens to cast ballots in their elections.
Georgia does not allow cities to set election rules on their own; at the least, the Legislature must approve local legislation. For example, elections for some county boards of education are partisan, with Republican and Democratic party primaries in the spring followed by a general election in November; others are nonpartisan, with a single election determining the winner. Local officials can ask the Legislature to change the election from one format to the other, and the Legislature decides whether to do so. But local legislation can’t overcome the state law that says only citizens can vote in state and local elections.
Of the cities that have enacted non-citizen voting, some have faced court challenges — and most of those court challenges have been successful.
In December 2021, New York City’s city council extended the right to vote in municipal elections to non-citizens legally living in the city, according to Ballotpedia.com. It became law the following January and made New York the biggest city in America that let non-citizens vote.
But a year after the law took effect, opponents filed suit against it, and on June 27, 2022, the New York State Supreme Court for Staten Island overturned it, ruling that the law violated the state’s constitution. On Feb. 21 of this year, the appellate court upheld that ruling.
The situation was not much different in San Francisco, where voters approved a change to the city charter that would allow non-citizens whose children were in the city school system to vote for members of the city board of education. Voters approved the change in 2016, it took effect in 2018, but in 2022 San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard B. Ulmer Jr. ruled that the law violated the California Constitution.
To be sure, not every court case has gone that way. The D.C. Noncitizen Vote Act, which allowed non-citizens to vote in Washington, D.C., elections, first had to get past bipartisan opposition in the U.S. House of Representatives, then was met with a court challenge. The U.S. District Court dismissed that challenge, though, stating that the plaintiffs’ votes would not be diluted by allowing non-citizens to vote.
Georgia law is clear: Only citizens can vote.
Georgia politics is clear: Legislators are not going to change the law to allow non-citizens to vote.
Court rulings are not quite as clear, but they lean strongly against allowing non-citizens to vote — even in states known for being far more liberal than Georgia.
Any attempt to allow non-citizens to vote in Georgia will fail, even without the proposed constitutional amendment.
___
Brunswick News. June 5, 2024.
Editorial: New cobia proposal will hurt Georgia anglers
When it comes to dividing up the bounty of the sea, fairness doesn’t seem to play much of a role for federal regulators. That is certainly the impression the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is giving off with its proposed changes to the amount of cobia states can harvest.
The commission currently divides the cobia recreation harvest on a state-by-state basis. Georgia anglers get 9% of the 76,900 allotment of the states in the commission’s jurisdiction. That total amounts to 7,229 fish limit annually.
Other states have a higher allotment than Georgia. Virginia has the highest allocation at 30,302 fish, followed by North Carolina with 29,302 cobia and South Carolina with 9,306. The states north of Virginia split the remaining 729 allotment.
States do go over these limits sometimes. Georgia, however, has been pretty good for the most part about not going over its target limit. The state was over in 2023 with more than 11,000 cobia harvested and in 2021 with more than 8,000 collected, but the state was also below its totals in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
The same can’t be said for the state with the largest allocation. Virginia has gone over its target limit every year since 2018. States above Virginia have also overshot their target limits in recent years. North and South Carolina have been below their limits since 2018.
Those stats have the commission considering possible changes to how cobia is managed. One proposal includes reallocating the limits, which would result in a lower target number for Georgia. The state’s limit could drop by 2,600 with this proposal.
Taking away from Georgia anglers just so other states can harvest more fish without going over their limit doesn’t make much sense. The only thing that will do is put Georgia over its limit more often while the other states may stay below their targets — and it’s not a guarantee that the other states will be able to stay in their limit even with an increase.
It’s also evident that going over the limit isn’t that big of a deal. Virginia hasn’t hit its target mark since 2018, and there haven’t been any negative complications for the state. If it was really a problem, it seems like this issue would have come up sooner.
The commission’s proposed allocation changes seem like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. It’s not going to solve the problem of more cobia being spotted further north because of warmer ocean temperatures.
If you have an opinion on the proposal, you can express it during a public hearing from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. June 20. Sign up for the hearing at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/4078966477099083616. You can also submit comments via email using the subject line Cobia Draft Addendum II to comments@asmfc.org through July 8.
END