Civics: Citizenship – what does it mean?
“There’s no common sense to this at all,” said Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. “This is, in its worst iteration, a nefarious action to minimize our rights. And I think that pig with lipstick is just still a pig.”
When Wisconsin allowed non-citizens to vote
Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, non-citizens were allowed to vote in local, state and even federal elections in many states across the country.
That includes Wisconsin, where foreign citizens could vote in elections for all levels of government, provided they pledged their intent to become U.S. citizens. That policy lasted until 1908.
“As the United States economy expanded with industrialization and so forth, one of the ways that folks tried to lure immigrants to come westward, aside from access to land, was voting rights,” said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University who researches immigration and voting.
Research from Hayduk and his colleagues shows that 13.5% of the Wisconsin voters in 1900 were foreign citizens.
Those laws fell out of favor in the 20th century. Federal law was eventually changed to bar foreign citizens from voting in elections for president and U.S. Congress, while some states passed laws prohibiting them from participating in gubernatorial and legislative elections.
