Citizenship Is Essential to Voting

In recent years, municipalities including New York City, Chicago and San Francisco, have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, and Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., have taken steps in that direction. Voters in Oakland, Calif., will be asked in November to allow noncitizen voting. A bill to allow noncitizen voting passed a crucial committee vote in the District of Columbia this month. In some of these places, the right to vote is extended not only to lawful permanent residents but to students, workers with visas but no green cards, and even illegal aliens.

Why should voters elsewhere care if a few cities—or even states—decide to allow noncitizen voting? One reason is to demarcate a baseline of election normalcy. The declining public confidence in election results—shared across Democrats, independents, and Republicans—is shaped in part by the sense that voting rules are constantly manipulated for partisan gain. Affirming the tradition of citizen-only voting is an important first step in re-establishing consistent election rules.

More important, restricting voting to citizens reminds us that voting for government isn’t like voting for the winner on “American Idol.” Voting is how citizens come together to govern ourselves. How strange that even as Democrats warn that foreign disinformation might affect how Americans vote, Democratic-controlled cities are granting aliens—including those in the U.S. temporarily and illegally—the right to vote in our elections.

Americans welcome immigrants and hope they will choose to become citizens. But until they do, they don’t vote. As Justice

Byron White

observed in Cabell v. Chavez-Salido (1982): “Exclusion of aliens from basic governmental processes is not a deficiency in the democratic system but a necessary consequence of the community’s process of political self-definition.”

Mr. Smith is a law professor at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. He served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission in 2004.