The Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to remove a proposal allowing certain noncitizens to vote in municipal elections from the November ballot, sending it back for additional public outreach and committee review.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said he wants to reconsider a proposal that would allow certain noncitizens to vote in Los Angeles municipal elections.
The proposal had been expected to appear on the November ballot. However, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to remove it from consideration and send it back to committee for additional review.
Soto-Martínez said more public outreach was needed before asking voters to decide on the measure. He acknowledged that important questions about how the proposal would work had not been fully addressed and said voters should have clear information before casting ballots.
He also said he had heard concerns from community members, including leaders in the Black community, and believed those concerns warranted further discussion.
Although Soto-Martínez supported delaying the proposal, he did not withdraw his support for the underlying idea of allowing certain noncitizen residents to participate in local elections. He said the proposal should be refined before being presented to voters.
The council’s action delays, but does not end, consideration of the measure. Further committee review will determine whether a revised proposal is brought back to the City Council at a later date.
Early in the morning a report by Politico said that many Democrats were keeping their distance from the proposal to allow noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections — the latest sign of how fraught voting rights and immigration have become in the Trump era.
Already, the proposal had been met with cautious responses from prominent California Democrats, including Bass and her mayoral rival Nithya Raman, while critics warned it could provoke the Trump administration, expose immigrants to greater deportation risk, and go further than some California cities’ more restrained noncitizen voting measures.
“Right now wasn’t the best time for all of that,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for governor, told Playbook.
Villaraigosa said he supported allowing noncitizen parents to vote in school board elections but worried the current political climate would discourage many people from participating because of ongoing immigration raids.
He wasn’t the only Democrat with apprehensions. Even after the City Council voted 10-5 to advance Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez’s measure as part of his charter reforms, key Los Angeles power players remained publicly noncommittal.
A spokesperson for Bass pointed Playbook to comments she made during the May 6 NBC LA mayoral debate, where candidates were asked a yes-or-no question about whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote in local elections.
Her answer? “It depended.”
“It didn’t mean they were undocumented,” Bass added. “They could have green cards, they could be here perfectly legally… We had to see what the councilman was proposing.”
Raman struck a similar note during the debate. Later, during a June council meeting, she said she was “very supportive of exploring expanding” the proposal. She echoed that sentiment in a statement to Playbook.
“Los Angeles was home to so many residents who paid taxes, raised families, and sent their children to our schools — and I believed the principle that those residents deserved a voice in the decisions that shaped their lives was worth exploring seriously,” Raman wrote.
