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1 Introduction

This paper argues for an expansion of the suffrage in American local governmental elections significantly beyond what is currently permitted in most local elections in the United States. If adopted, the two recommendations for widening the opportunities for electoral participation discussed below would in some local governmental jurisdictions increase the number of qualified voters significantly. In some places, the increase may be larger than the adult population currently eligible to vote. The recommendations are as follows:

  1. 1.

    Allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local governmental jurisdictions.

  2. 2.

    Allowing individuals who demonstrably live in two local areal jurisdictions to claim dual residency with local voting rights in both districts.

The paper defends these recommendations by examining changing expectations in our understanding for citizenship and residency and their implications for electoral regimes. A major change in our understanding of citizenship as explored in this paper is the rise of dual citizenship. Citizenship is no longer widely understood as a singular exclusive relationship to one state at a time. A second major factor is the importance of a single declared and recognized residency within a number of countries, notably the United States. A third important factor is the changing relationship between citizenship and residency and the implications for how we should think about voting rights at home and abroad.

This paper will first discuss, in Sect. 8.2.1, selected questions in the relationship between voting and representation. Next, Sect. 8.2.2 will survey changing expectations for citizenship. Sections 8.3 and 8.4 review the constraining role of singular residency. Finally, Sect. 8.5 will present proposals for selected expansion of access to the franchise.

2 Citizenship, Residency, and Expectations for Voting

Across the globe today, many people can vote in two sovereign countries by partially residing in each (Faist and Gerdes 2008). In addition, a number of countries permit dual voters to reside in one country but hold voting rights in another country as well. In contrast, people holding citizenship within one country are confined to vote in one jurisdiction alone within that country—that is, the jurisdiction that has accorded them residential status. This paper argues that the narrow focus on claiming a single residency raises problems about the reality of American mobility and meaning of preclusive residency rules. At the same time, it ignores the implications of citizenship across national borders that raise appealing opportunities to address electoral participation across internal borders.

Voting matters in the United States as it does in other established democracies. Electoral outcomes are determinative of political leadership and are influential on public policy making. An obvious measure of the importance of the franchise is the long and often-contentious history of extending the suffrage to denied populations. Inclusion was not a descriptor of nineteenth century electorates on both sides of the Atlantic. The British Reform Act of 1832 that set the course for future expansions of the suffrage only increased the electorate from about 9 % to 18 % of the male population (British Library 2015). The majority of people were not allowed to vote until the twentieth century. A decision to exclude was justified on the various grounds of unsuitability for civic participation that are discussed below. The importance of elections has meant recurring political contestation over two related yet distinct questions: ballot access and the expectations for representation.

2.1 Ballot Access

The range of groups denied the suffrage historically varied by the country in question. Many countries shared a similar commitment to massive exclusion of people who did not meet a property qualification, an identified educational standard, the proper sex, or some other qualification. In the United States there were steady demands for inclusion and for equal treatment for groups such as American Indians who were here before the formation of the union and African-Americans who were present at the creation and partially counted for representation but were not allowed to vote. The extension of the franchise to women was an affirmation of a majoritarian principle, since for the first time a majority of the defined adult population could now vote. In addition to African-Americans, people of Asian descent and Mexican descent frequently were excluded from exercising the franchise. Both federal and state interventions were required to enable people of color to vote (Keyssar 2009). Various groups of people with disabilities were excluded from the franchise either by law or by practical barriers to access; some of these barriers persist. And the denial of voting rights to convicted felons remains a source of ongoing controversy.

In contrast to the experience of most people of color with long histories of living in the United States or of immigrants arriving from non-European countries, immigrants from various parts of Europe were recruited to vote, often immediately upon their arrival. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, such immigrant groups were sometimes recruited by political parties to vote without necessarily holding citizenship; in fact, they were promised citizenship if they voted for the party that recruited them into the voting booth. Moreover, immigrants themselves often sought out the vote as recognition of acceptance into American society (Hayduk 2006).

The debate over access to the suffrage has long been framed as fulfilling the promise of equality associated with American citizenship. Over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the claim was gradually accepted that to be an adult citizen (albeit not imprisoned or with intellectual disabilities or mental illness) was to be allowed to vote. The debate over representation in the United States has been a debate over inclusion—whether to extend the suffrage to more and more of the population living in the United States. Over time the relationship was established between access to the voting booth and possessing American citizenship (Raskin 1993). Equality came to be understood as one person, one vote. It became a defining measure of the drive to achieve democratic representation in American politics from the post-Civil War constitutional amendments, through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, and of course the present day controversies over voter I.D. laws and laws denying the franchise to individuals convicted of crimes (Wang 2012).

The doctrine of one person, one vote was accepted in emerging European democracies as well. But another important theme in European debates over electoral reform has concerned institutional rules for representation. European debate over how the institutional rules that govern electoral systems shape the representation of small parties in parliament and permit shared exercise of power became a more explicit concern in many European states than in the United States. In Europe there has been far more serious discussion and for far longer than in the United States over whether or not their particular state should adopt proportional representation and, if so, what sort of proportional representational system should be adopted in order to improve the chances of minority parties gaining parliamentary representation (Leemann 2014). Would, for example the adoption of a proportional representation system promote the risk of too many small parties having representation in the legislature, as a consequence making it difficult to form an effective government?

In the United States, electoral reform debates are not held on the merits of proportional representation versus the efficiency of a winner take all system in political representation. The absence of any sort of national debate over other ways to explore representation for a complex and diverse society has meant that the debate has concentrated on the inclusion of minority electoral participation as in the Voting Rights Act. This highly focused understanding of representation has a good deal of merit, of course, in a country where electoral exclusion of much of the population was the reality for much of its history. But it should not be understood as the only value that should guide access to the franchise.

The debate over expanding access to the ballot box has been framed as the acceptance of the commitment to equal treatment judged to be integral to American citizenship. Equality of access to voting has relied on a narrowly conceived understanding of political equality as core to what is meant by American citizenship. Largely not addressed is representation for a fluid population made up of citizens who are partial residents of more than one community and non-citizens who are either part time residents or full time residents and in both cases are without institutional recourse to capture the attention of local policy makers—policy makers who play an ongoing role in shaping the course of their daily lives. This paper seeks, in part, to argue that our understanding of citizenship is changing both domestically and multi-nationally, and we should take the lesson of this changing understanding of citizenship to offer a model to reconsider who should be able to vote locally. But first a brief discussion is needed about citizenship and voting expectations.

2.2 Citizenship and Voting Expectations

This section draws attention to the changing expectations that long standing debates over citizenship have had for voting in democracies: that is, who should be allowed to vote and which justifications are persuasive in widening or restricting electoral participation.

Citizenship and voting are interconnected in the U.S. today. As discussed in the last section, this comes as no surprise, but it is important to recognize that at various times the two have not been connected at all or have been connected in institutionally unconventional ways. In some time periods and in some areas within the United States, as well as of course in many other nations, the possession of citizenship and the permission to vote are entirely independent of one another. In other cases the grant of access to the ballot box may precede the award of citizenship.

Traditionally, residency is regarded as a necessary condition for a new arrival to a nation to obtain citizenship. But it is not at all uncommon for people who have never lived in a certain country and are unlikely to ever do so to have voting rights and/or citizenship in that country. In addition, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, citizenship was often not an explicit requirement for the act of voting. The United States experienced successive waves of immigrants, and party competition for these new voters was intense. Such competition may have contributed to recruiting local residents to vote regardless of how they had arrived. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, citizenship had become a necessary condition for voting in American elections. A further great change in our understanding of citizenship is that we no longer see holding citizenship as exclusively confined to one nation only, for many people possess citizenship in more than one country.

Three contributions of the debates over expectations for citizenship that have largely shaped the debates over how we think about fairness in voting are discussed below: egalitarianism, human rights protection in the exercise of the suffrage, and the responsibilities of citizenship.

A lasting expectation for citizenship that arose from the late eighteenth century revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic is that citizenship is the formal recognition that all citizens are to be treated equally regardless of their social and/or economic position in their society (Heater 1999). Citizens, regardless of their respective social and economic condition, enjoy equal access to participation in state institutions. The Rights of Man adopted during the course of the French Revolution stressed that equality in political participation was open to all citizens. “Each citizen has an equal right to participate in the formation of the law and in the selection of his mandatories or his agents” (Hunt 1996).

The application of this egalitarian understanding of citizenship in making sure each voter is the equal of every other voter was achieved in large part with the abolition of qualifications based on property, prior condition of servitude, or gender and by lowering the voting age. In the United States, as in a number of other federal systems, the egalitarian principle was not applied to the upper house where states were given equal representation despite variations in state populations. The egalitarian principle for the lower house, the House of Representatives, is apparent in the commitment to legislative reapportionment in the attempt to distribute the registered population equally among the set of legislative districts. It should be pointed out that in federal systems, particularly the American federal system with elected upper houses where state boundaries enjoy constitutional protection, the egalitarian principle in representation is not met, given that shifting populations do not result in the adjustment of state boundaries. This constitutional understanding of two forms of representation—one based on population, the House, and the other, the Senate, designed to represent the states—does suggest an openness to different expressions of egalitarian representation. The question that these federal arrangements call to our attention is part of a larger discussion about institutional arrangements: that is, not only to make sure that everyone gets to vote but also to assess the effectiveness of that vote for all the people who live in our nation. What should be explicitly explored is how we distribute public policy and regulatory decision-making particularly at local levels and the seeming institutional disinterest in adjusting access to the franchise. One important element in this exploration is the significance of the franchise for the many people whose lives cross domestic borders and for the many others who are recognized as residents but are denied electoral access to the local elected officials who shape their lives on a local daily basis.

The understanding of equality as inclusion, as will be argued later, often generates confusion for voters who move. This very act of movement seems to challenge the prevailing understanding of electoral equality of one person, one vote, given the importance assigned to residency as a necessary condition for voter registration. The question of how best to represent people who move is often obscured by the preoccupying commitment to identifying a single residency for the enrolled voter.

The second and related expectation of our understanding of voting that is closely associated with citizenship draws from the contribution of classical liberalism that defined the limits to state power and the corresponding importance of defining and protecting individual rights afforded the citizenry. The burden is on the state to guarantee access for citizens seeking office, electoral participation, and other related rights that make the act of voting meaningful. The protection of citizens’ right to vote, to gather information, and to express views all are part of a bundle of rights that are conventionally understood as critical to electoral participation. This approach to citizenship concentrates on political rights and not social rights as a foundation for voting. Over time the expectation in the United States is that citizens determine the extent to which they should prepare themselves to vote, but it is the obligation of the state to protect the citizenry in the exercise of their franchise.

The third strand in the understanding of citizenship focuses on the relationship between citizenship and civic obligation. Voting is one of a set of responsibilities that make up civic engagement. The engaged citizen is critical to the political and social wellbeing of the republic; if citizens exercise their respective responsibilities in a thoughtful, informed, and sustained way, then the quality of democracy is substantively improved. The state is expected to facilitate the exercise of the citizens’ responsibilities, but the exercise of responsibility rests with the citizenry. Jason Brennan has argued that a citizen who does not prepare for voting through gathering information and thoughtful discussion has not done her or his duty, and therefore should not cast a ballot (Brennan 2011). The emphasis on citizen responsibility places the burden on the citizen not the state and brings back the problematic assumption accepted by political leaders during the pre-egalitarian era that only those people who were qualified by their background and social position were the people who should vote.

These contrasting expectations are often deployed in debates on the relationship between citizenship and voting rights found in the citizenship/electoral regimes discussed below. The understanding is that once people have citizenship they have the state’s commitment to protect equal access to the voting booth albeit with qualifying rules. But as observed earlier this understanding of equality is a narrow one and certainly does not mean, for example, equal limits in the amount of money that each citizen can donate, let alone any thought of taking into account the many people with only modest resources who may not be able to give very much to a campaign. In contrast, the tradition of citizenship as virtue shifts a significant measure of responsibility from the state to its citizens. Later in the discussion of residency, we will see how and why residency and registration remain contested as to whether residency should constrain access to the voting booth.

In contemporary discussions of citizenship much is made of the expectation that people should vote. Campaigns to encourage voting are undertaken in various parts of the country. A number of such campaigns do work, and turnout does increase for a limited time.

Preparing for the act of voting in the U.S. is assumed to flow from the information acquired from the extended political campaigns. A working assumption is that the educational system has instructed citizens as to how American political institutions work. Individuals who acquire citizenship at a later age also are expected to learn about American institutions. Residents seeking naturalization are required to pass a modest test administered by the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service for prospective citizens. A person seeking to become a citizen must correctly answer six questions on this test.

There is little prospect that American election officials would opt to increase the number of thoughtful voters at the expense of increasing turnout regardless of the quality of the voter produced. The bare commitment to inclusion is the prevailing norm. The equality principle with its emphasis on inclusion and increased turnout is the prevailing commitment, and adoption of an objective such as voter preparation that might depress turnout levels would be seen as an unacceptable trade off. The concern is enduring that the imposition of tests of citizenship knowledge and the workings of American democracy should not be deployed to keep people from voting and should be kept to a minimum for naturalized citizens. This concern rests on the history of past efforts, notably in the South during the Jim Crow era, to restrict black voting through a range of devices such as passing a required civics test. In short, anything that smacks of state assisted voter preparation that may suppress turnout is viewed skeptically.

3 Residency

Residency is a necessary condition for American voter registration (NASS 2008). The centrality of the identification of a single residential address in order to be registered to vote and the implications for political representation for people who move, and particularly people who move back and forth, is a comparatively unexamined topic, however. Reliance on residency matters as an anchor both to insure one person one vote and perhaps as an affirmation of a spatial model of representation. Locating a citizen within geographically defined space is consistent with the importance we assign to where you live as some measure of political representation. Discussed below is a twist on the residency requirement such that, in a number of American states, when a citizen lives abroad, the residency of her or his parents may serve as the residency of the overseas voter.

Voter registration is still difficult for people without easy access to official documents that establish an address, however. This seems even more difficult for Americans when they move and seek to register in a new location. A declaration of residency may be confirmed in some American states by a range of items to verify a residential address, including a driver’s license, a utilities bill, a state I.D. card, a passport, or a pay stub. But even with that caveat of the difficulty in verifying a home address or securing a driver’s license for residential registration, we can only infer why the local residential connection matters.

States may require that a person who has moved to the state from another state live at a new address for up to 30 days before allowing them to vote. The majority of states require over 20 days. In contrast, other states allow for 1-day registration in order to vote.

It should be pointed out that residency rules governing services other than voting vary within states depending on what requirements the state has established for services it supplies. U.S. states demand much more in the way of evidence and time spent in the state in determining if an out of state student is eligible for in state tuition and even more detail to establish that a deceased former resident actually left the state for an established residence in another state so that his or her estate is no longer subject to the former state’s inheritance taxes.

The Brennan Center has argued that the state variations in required proof needed to register to vote and the identification to actually vote stifle electoral participation. The Center has argued for the adoption of a new electronic registration system that would make registration portable and thus in their judgment would maintain similar levels of electoral participation for movers as is found among more stationary residents (Perez 2009).

4 Crossing National Borders and the Vote: The Interplay of Citizenship, Residency, and Representation

Whether a person gets to vote in an election in which he or she was not allowed to vote in the past depends on a number of different factors. It usually involves some combination of citizenship and residency or only one or none of the above. The politics that has driven who is to be given citizenship has often been separated from the politics that has driven the expansion or contraction of who is allowed to vote. There are many examples across the globe in which citizenship and residency function differently with respect to access to the franchise. To give one example, in the United Kingdom during the time of Britain’s empire, to move to Britain was a means to vote if one were so inclined. It is still possible to do so today for some groups. Today there are larger numbers of citizens from Commonwealth countries who have neither British citizenship nor E.U. citizenship but are allowed to vote in British General Elections than there were in the past (Electoral Commission 2014). The contrast with the practices in U.S. domestic elections as described above should be apparent. There is, however, an intriguing example even for the U.S. Many immigrants to the U.S. are allowed to become American citizens without surrendering citizenship in their country, thus enabling U.S. citizens to vote in more than one country even though they reside in the U.S.Footnote 1

In other states such as Italy and France, another approach has been adopted to apply to voting beyond the nation’s borders. France gives seats by global region in the national legislature for French citizens living abroad. Italy has the same provisions for seats in the Italian Parliament (Roman 2014). The Italian overseas electorate includes descendants of the Italian emigrant diaspora.

Yet another way of extending the electorate to people living in other lands is to grant citizenship to people living in nearby lands who share a common language and/or a shared ethnicity. Hungary is one of several countries that have extended the offer of citizenship and voting rights to people who are regarded as kin but live in other nearby countries. Thus, these non-residential Hungarians may vote in the elections of two different countries (Thorpe 2013).

Over 122 nation states allow for dual citizenship, a number vastly increased from three decades ago. There are also some nations that do not necessarily allow for dual citizenship for some categories of people but do allow for dual voters. There are a number of ways in which the interplay of residency and citizenship across national boundaries generates opportunities for voting in more than one national state.

The acceptance of dual citizenship is now widespread around the planet. Many people holding dual citizenship may be permitted to participate in similar elections but in different sovereign nations. A study of 144 sovereign states found 115 of these states give the vote to their respective citizens who are permanent residents of other countries. It is true that 13 of the states granting the vote to citizens living elsewhere require the non-residential elector to return “home” to vote, but the rest do not. Moreover, 12 of these states give the non-resident citizens seats in their respective national legislatures (Collyer and Vathi 2007).

There are several types of such arrangements. In one type, individuals who have emigrated from a sovereign state are allowed to retain citizenship of their land of origin even after they have acquired citizenship from their new homeland. Holding citizenship in two sovereign states may also enable them to have voting rights in both states. In a second arrangement, some states such as Italy and France may not only allow dual citizens living elsewhere to have voting rights but also provide representation in their respective national legislatures. Third, some countries, notably Italy, allow the descendants of emigrants voting rights even if they have never lived in that homeland or possessed citizenship in it. Fourth, a state may award citizenship and voting rights to individuals in another state on the grounds that the individuals in question have linguistic or ethnic ties to the state extending citizenship—possibly including people who have neither lived in the state making the offer nor had an ancestor(s) who lived in the state. A fifth model is extending citizenship and voting rights in other states to people by treaty. Such voting rights may not be grounded in emigration, descent, or a shared cultural background. Such is the case with the European Union that grants European citizenship to citizens holding national citizenships in the respective member states (The European Commission 2014).

The point of this enumeration is to emphasize two observations. The first is to draw attention to the willingness of policy makers to grant voting rights independently of citizenship. The second is the rise of dual citizenship that has resulted in a set of people having voting rights in more than one country. Both of these observations, this paper suggests, should enable us to consider the value of multiple voting rights for a mobile population within a country.

There are, however, useful illustrations of the point that residency does not always matter in voting in U.S. elections. The obvious illustration is serving with the armed forces abroad. But there is another illustration of being allowed to vote in U.S. elections without physically residing in the States. Today there are 31 American states where persons may claim to be resident of the district where their family once lived but they themselves do not reside and indeed have never resided (Federal Assistance Voting Program 2014).

In short, given the innovations found in voting, citizenship, and residency that link Americans to electoral participation while living in other countries, or that empower non-residents to vote in other nations, we should be open to exploring new ways to strengthen electoral inclusion within our own national borders.

The next section discusses the two recommendations presented at the outset. Crucial in this discussion is that if citizenship should matter in being allowed to vote it should matter more in federal and national elections, but the argument why citizenship matters seems much less persuasive at the local level. Stanley Renshon has argued that awarding voting to non-citizens could engender sharp disagreement within the nation and takes away an important and distinguishing component of what it is to be citizen (Renshon 2009). In reply, it is hard to continue to maintain that in an age of mobility we should not partially address the question of inventing new institutional ways of building inclusion (Portes et al. 2008; Chung 1996).

5 Recommendations

This section defends the two recommendations presented at the outset:

  1. 1.

    Allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local governmental jurisdictions.

  2. 2.

    Allowing individuals who demonstrably live in two local areal jurisdictions to claim dual residency with local voting rights in both districts.

Joseph Carens in a discussion of what we owe immigrants argues that the longer someone lives in a place (their new country) the more they should have some say in the decisions that affect them (Carens 2010). Nearly 70 years ago, V.O. Key observed that no one pays attention to people if they do not have the vote (Key 1949). Both of these observations seem particularly applicable at the local governmental level where decisions are made that do not shape the nation’s future but certainly can shape the course of daily life for the people who reside in local governmental districts. The making of local public policy has implications for resource distribution for other residents, both citizens and non-citizens alike. Yet the lack of local franchising in the U.S. seems particularly striking in contrast to the ease of voting in selected other counties with less of an apparent stake in what is taking place. It seems reasonable to argue that partial residents, at least those residents who regularly divide their time between two locations for a range of reasons, should be thought about in the same way as people who only reside in one place. Perhaps some of the same reasons that apply to voting for people who only reside in one place should also be seen to support part-year residents’ ability to vote in both places of partial residence.

Why does the franchise matter? It may be the case from the perspective of some voters that they are not sure that their vote matters in electoral contests particularly if they are voters registered to vote in a safe district. But people who are not allowed to vote know that they are excluded from participation in the democratic institution formally designed to give people a voice in the selection of policy makers and the policies that will be adopted.

There are a number of reasons to extend the franchise to residential non-citizens in local elections. They are: first, the opportunity to vote is a recognition that their presence is politically included in the community in which they live and contribute. Second, office holders, as Carens suggests, are far more likely to pay attention to voters than to people denied the franchise. There is reason to believe that candidates for office are never entirely sure who will show up to vote in an upcoming election. Nor do they know for sure the size and membership of the coalition that will support or oppose them in that election. This sense of uncertainty seems to be reinforced by the American plurality electoral system that is occasionally sensitive to great changes arising from relatively small shifts in votes.

Over the past two and half centuries, established democracies have extended the franchise to people without money, to people of color, to women, and to younger people. This paper’s contribution to the enlargement of the electorate is to give the vote to resident non-citizens in local elections. Given the fluidity that has come to characterize citizenship and its implications for voting, described earlier, it is a fair question to ask as to why the argument in favor of voting in local elections for non-citizens should not be extended also to voting at the state and federal level—that is, why shouldn’t non-citizens be accorded the voting rights available to nearly all citizens?

The argument for initiating voting rights in local elections but not regional or national elections relies on three considerations. First is the value of the example found in a number of other nations around the globe allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections (Earnest 2006). The European Union extends limited voting rights to residents of member states who hold European citizenship but not the citizenship of the country where they are residing. Second, even though the acquisition or loss of citizenship in many sovereign states increasingly reflects changing domestic and international political conditions, nonetheless citizenship remains linked to the national level and as a consequence to national political institutions in a way that local government is not. Finally, there is a pragmatic argument for laying the foundation for local residents who are not citizens to vote locally, initiating a debate over the value of extending the franchise to regional and ultimately national elections.

The argument for granting electoral rights to non-citizens in local governments is related to the argument for granting rights for recurrent residents who divide their time annually between two local governmental districts. The arguments are related in supporting a claim for electoral participation in a jurisdiction that shapes the course of a person’s daily existence on a sustained or recurring basis.

Movement remains over the course of a lifetime an important characteristic of many Americans’ lives. About 12 million Americans fell into this category of part-year residents in 2014, up slightly from 2 years before. The Census Bureau (2013) estimates that there are about three million second homes in the United States. There also are some three million farm and migrant workers. Some 4.8 million Americans cross state lines in complete moves, half of the number from the 1990s. The majority of movers stay within their respective counties. It should also be observed that one quarter of Americans work in one county but live in another county (Frey 2006). In addition, there are over 30 million non-citizens living in the United States, of whom 19 million are legally recognized residents.Footnote 2 The other estimated 12 million lack such recognition.

Groups of second homeowners in the United States have from time to time sought a second vote particularly in local elections where the individuals elected have planning and budgetary authority for the district in which their respective homes are located. Some local governments in a number of states have allowed limited second voting by second homeowners (NCSL 2008). In 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the principle of the single residency rule in voting. It should be pointed out that this challenge to the single residency rule was not simply a matter of interest to the economically privileged; the Farmworker Legal Services of New York filed an amicus brief on behalf of Wit and his goal to be allowed to vote both in Manhattan and in East Hampton (Wit v. Berman 2003).

Courts in the state of New York have since clarified their understanding of voter registration rules and, as of 2007, New Yorkers may choose whether to register to vote at their primary residence or their second home if, of course, the second home is located in New York (Wilkie v. Board of Elections 2008). In a spring 2015 decision, the New York appellate court confirmed that voters with two homes in New York State who regularly divide their time between these two residences may choose the residential area in which to cast their vote, even if they appear to be motivated by a single issue in making the choice they do (Matter of Maas v. Gaebel 2015).

To be sure, a concern is that this may give second homeowners a certain electoral strategic value to their votes. Is even that strategic advantage a good idea given that second homeowners may be judged as better off property owners? Critics question whether the practice appears to be a return to voting discrimination based on property qualifications that challenge one person, one vote (Merrill 2011).

If we conceive of partial residency as embracing both the second homeowner, the migrant laborer, and other diverse groups of semi-residents, however, the debate over granting local voting rights in more than one constituency may provide access to representation for migrant workers as well as second home owners and, of course, retired people moving between the north and the south seasonally. The argument is that if for various reasons a person divides his or her time between two distinct areas where decision are made that shape their lives then extending suffrage to them in helping to select the local governments that play a substantive role in their lives is a commitment to inclusion—a value that is consistent with the steady expansion of voting rights over the course of the past two centuries and that recognizes that those who are sojourners are particularly aware of the importance of local governmental administration in shaping their daily lives.

6 Conclusion

The goal of these two recommendations is consistent with our past commitment to enlarge the proportion of the resident or partially resident population who can participate in decision-making. It is a proposal to expand the franchise once again. Past expansions of the franchise for blacks and for women were controversial. The arguments for continued exclusion of non-citizens at the national level do not lack foundation. But nothing of that scale is contemplated in these recommendations. Both address two aspects of movement for people who have recognized contributions to our society and may strengthen our understanding of representation in a society that both celebrates spatial representation and movement at the same time. Perhaps these proposals suggest an agenda for reflecting on what other resources should be shared for people who are committed to living in two places or people who are non-citizens, but this argument is beyond the scope of the present paper.