A superior court judge this month threw out a case seeking to bar residents of Burlington who are not U.S. citizens, but who are in compliance with federal immigration laws, from voting in local school district elections.
Burlington residents Michele Morin and Karen Rowell filed the lawsuit last June with backing from Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a nonprofit organization backed by Republicans that has filed multiple lawsuits nationwide seeking to curtail voting access on the state level, and the Republican National Committee.
Morin and Rowell argued that allowing noncitizens — which includes refugees, asylum seekers and green card holders — to vote on school budgets and board members violates Vermont’s Constitution. That’s because while school budgets in Burlington, and across Vermont, are voted on locally, the state plays a large role in funding them.
At the heart of the issue is how the Vermont Constitution is interpreted. It says voters should be “a citizen of the United States” in order to vote on “any matter that concerns the State of Vermont.”
Conservative groups have filed a series of lawsuits focused on whether the three municipalities that have approved noncitizen voting — Montpelier, Winooski and Burlington — violated the state constitution when they changed their local charters to implement it.
The Vermont Supreme Court, in 2023, found they did not. The Chittenden Superior Court last December dismissed a similar case over Winooski’s charter change.
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The Burlington lawsuit took a slightly different approach. The plaintiffs asked the court to bar noncitizens from voting specifically in education-related matters in local elections, arguing school budget and school board elections were ultimately a state issue and thus allowing non-U.S. citizens to vote on them violated the state’s constitution.
The City of Burlington asked the court to dismiss the case.
In a ruling issued on Feb. 7, Vermont Superior Court Judge Samuel Hoar agreed.
“School district elections have always been considered municipal, rather than statewide, in nature,” Hoar wrote.
The Burlington case cannot be refiled, but could be appealed.
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