Boston Debates Allowing Noncitizens to Vote Days Before Mayor’s Official ‘No-Whites’ Christmas Party

Mayor Michelle Wu speaks during the grand opening of Northeastern Universitys EXP Complex.
Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
Warner Todd Huston

Ahead of Boston Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu’s “no whites” Christmas party, the city council was seen debating whether or not to allow noncitizens to vote in city elections.

The council first discussed the issue during a December 4 council meeting when councilor Kendra Lara introduced a home rule petition to open the polls to noncitizens, Fox News reported.

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“We have people who, despite not being given a voice in their local government through the ballot, have worked, sacrificed and invested in their neighborhoods, and all people should have a say in the decisions that impact their daily lives,” Lara said in the council chambers.

The council members heard from Jessie Carpenter, a city clerk for Takoma Park, Maryland, who told them her small jurisdiction had “hundreds” of noncitizens registered as voters after they began allowing noncitizens to vote.

However, it became clear that Boston — which reportedly has 672,000 residents with 28.2% being foreign-born, according to the city website — would have thousands of noncitizen voters to identify if the ordinance were passed, making record keeping a far more difficult task than it is for Takoma Park and its far fewer 17,000 residents.

Takoma Park reported that it only had 72 noncitizens cast a ballot in 2017.

Elections Commissioner Eneida Tavares insisted that allowing noncitizens to vote in the far larger town of Boston would present a very difficult challenge for maintaining voter rolls.

“Our preferred method would be to use the secretary of state’s database because it’s just one place where we can house everything,” Tavares explained. “It’s easier to update voting, voter information, give voter history to voters and everything of that nature.”

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Tavares also warned that if a noncitizen registers to vote, their information becomes public record and city officials would not be able to keep an individual’s immigration status private if courts or law enforcement were to request the information.

Other council members worried that noncitizens would also think they could vote in state and federal elections when their new ordinance would only allow them to vote in citywide elections. This, the critics worried, would “accidentally” put noncitizens in a position of committing voter fraud by illegally casting ballots for elections other than city elections.

City councilor Liz Breadon exclaimed, “If they’re on a pathway to citizenship, you didn’t want a mistake to happen that would put that in jeopardy because the federal government has a big black and white all or nothing approach to these things.”

There was also no plan presented on how election officials would vet, track, or identify these noncitizen voters.

Meanwhile, only days later, Wu was mired in controversy by hosting a no-whites-allowed Christmas party, which she scheduled for the same night as the city council’s holiday party that included all races.

Wu’s aide, Denise DosSantos, who serves as the mayor’s director of City Council relations, had sent out the “Electeds of Color” party invitations to the entire council — whites included — telling email recipients that whites were not invited.

Only a few hours later, DosSantos sent out a second email to the white council members making sure they understood that they were not invited to attend the party and apologized for “accidentally” sending them the invitation in the first place.

“I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologize if my email may have offended or came across as so,” DosSantos wrote in her dis-invitation email sent only to white people. “Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.”

As the city’s first elected Asian mayor, Wu defended the segregated party event and noted it has been going on for years in the city, calling the email snafu just an “honest mistake.”

“We’ve had individual conversations with everyone so people understand that it was truly just an honest mistake that went out in typing the email field,” the New York Post reported.

Wu’s segregated party even excluded her own husband, Conor, who is a white man.

Despite the controversy, Wu celebrated her exclusionary, race-based gathering with a photo posted to Instagram:

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