New York Could Be America's First City To Let Non-Citizens Vote

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13. Most European countries allow non-citizens to vote in local elections and it was common in the US.

Most Americans are unaware that non-citizen voting was widespread in the United States for the first 150 years of its history. From 1776 until 1926, 22 states and federal territories allowed non-citizens to vote in local, state, and even federal elections but gradually repealed this right. The US Constitution gives states and municipalities the right to decide who is eligible to vote.

Non-citizen voting rights, however, were largely repealed due to the anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Precedents for this include New York City, where non-citizens voted in school board elections from 1970 to 2003 (when school boards were dissolved as part of a recentralization effort), and Chicago, where non-citizens received school board voting rights in 1988.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?ID=265