The Pickle series entitled "Treating people like people." Voting Rights Edition

Many people – and I was one of them until two days ago – don’t know that non-citizens for the most part had the right to vote in this country until the middle of the 19th century. I discovered this while reading for a class I have this semester at the Kennedy School, called “Reasoning for History.”

That only citizens can vote is an orthodoxy that is rarely questioned. Question it, though, and it is at least apparent that it should be questioned. My neighbor is a permanent legal resident whose kids go to the Cambridge public schools. Shouldn’t she be allowed to vote for the school committee? I try to imagine an argument for why she shouldn’t, and I suddenly remember the debate I bellicosely and ungracefully got into a few years ago with a Republican friend of a friend at a bar in Washington about why DC should or should not have representation in Congress. I dared him to answer the question, and he took a deep breath, and then began “DC was never intended to be…” and seconds later I had to be peeled off the ceiling.

My permanent-resident neighbor is only the least ambiguous on an increasingly ambiguous spiral staircase of cases asking who should be allowed to vote in what elections. But her case is really unambiguous; there is no standard by which she is not a fully interested member of our community who should be allowed to have a say in how she is governed.

Recently, some cities have allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections. It’s a movement we should all pay attention to and encourage.