Minnesota to give non-citizens the vote?

Minnesota to give non-citizens the vote?
Plan would limit new privilege to those in U.S. legally

Elected leaders in Minnesota are thinking about giving non-citizens the right to vote.

According to a report in the Pioneer Press, Rep. Phyllis Kahn, D-Minneapolis, introduced a plan for a constitutional amendment to let residents who are not yet citizens of the United States vote.

The Minnesota Monitor said Democrats Jim Davnie and Frank Hornstein, from Minneapolis, and St. Paul's Carlos Mariani joined as sponsors.

"I signed onto it because I believe it is important that people most affected by local decisions (such [as] levels of fire protection) have some way to hold decision makers accountable," said Mariani.

He said these people probably will be citizens in the future and this is "a good way to prepare them for that eventuality."

The plan would have to be approved by the state House and Senate, and then state voters in 2008 would be asked if the state constitution should be amended "to allow local units of government to authorize permanent resident non-citizens to vote in local government elections?"

Illegal immigrants would not be included in the voting plan, officials said.

Kahn told the Star-Tribune that people would have to be at least 18 and have lived in the precinct for 30 days to vote in local elections. Permanent residents are defined as those who have permission to be in the U.S., although they have not finished, or sometimes even begun, the citizenship process.

"It's one of the basic principles that the country was founded on, which is no taxation without representation," Kahn said. The change would provide "a very limited right" for them to help control their destiny, Kahn said.

However, House Minority Leader Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, said it would just cause problems. For example, if the change is made, different ballots would have to be created for local elections because citizens also would vote on state and federal races, but non-citizens would not.

Minnesota blogger Michael Brodkorb said while there is a certain validity to the argument of "taxation without representation," he just believes non-citizens should not be allowed to vote.

Officials in St. Paul previously had considered opening their city ballot to non-citizens. They noted several municipalities in Maryland have allowed some form of non-citizen voting, and Chicago allows non-citizens to vote in school board elections.

But Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the proposal didn't even fly in San Francisco when it was proposed there. "I think it just rubs people the wrong way."

Minnesota voters were in the news just a few months ago when residents in one Congressional district elected a Muslim man, Keith Ellison. Just a few years earlier, he had joined Bernadine Dohrn, one of the founders of the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground, and several other speakers at a fundraiser for recently arrested Kathleen Soliah, a.k.a. Sara Jan Olson.

Soliah – who along with a small band of Bay Area radicals took in Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst, the last surviving members of the Symbionese Liberation Army following a 1974 shootout in Los Angeles – had been on the run since the three SLA "soldiers" were captured in September 1975.

Initially charged with planting pipe bombs under two police cars in Los Angeles in August 1975, Soliah was later charged in Sacramento for the murder of a bank customer killed in an April 1975 holdup after the victim's son exerted pressure through the media to reopen the case. Hearst, in her 1981 book, "Every Secret Thing," described the bungled robbery as an SLA operation in which she, Soliah, the Harrises and several others participated.

Soliah was arrested in 1999 in St. Paul, Minn., where she had been living under the name Sara Jane Olson.