House Republicans have warned that the District’s new law allowing noncitizens to vote and run in local elections would make “a mockery of the constitutional republic” and “embolden criminals to run rampant.” The Washington Post editorial board called it “radical” and predicted it would “set back the cause of statehood” and “make passage of bipartisan immigration reform on Capitol Hill less likely.” Even former Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh argued it was a “foolish” policy that would allow “complete strangers” to participate in D.C. politics.

Considering the apocalyptic nature of those predictions, Loose Lips finds it a bit odd that the District has started to implement the new law, yet somehow the city is still standing. The Board of Elections says it has already registered three noncitizens to vote without incident. One has even launched a bid for a vacant seat on an Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Ward 4. And considering that no one else filed to run before the deadline to collect petition signatures passed, D.C. will almost certainly soon have its first noncitizen elected official.

“The sky’s not going to fall,” predicts Abel Amene, an Ethiopian immigrant who hopes to represent ANC4D02 in Brightwood Park. “I just want to contribute to this community that I’m a part of.”

Abel, who asked to be referred to by his first name due to Ethiopia’s patronymic naming conventions, has been organizing for the past few years with progressive groups to get the noncitizen voting bill over the finish line. He even became the first noncitizen to register to vote after the law formally took effect on Oct. 1, and he hopes his run for office can help “socialize the idea of noncitizens being not only voting members of a community, but running for elected office, too.” Under the law the D.C. Council passed last year, noncitizens will still be barred from voting or running in federal races, but they’ll be able to participate in local elections.

But, fundamentally, Abel says his run is mostly about the sort of nitty gritty local stuff that most ANC races are made of: Traffic safety, first and foremost. He’s tired of watching cars speed up and down Missouri and Kansas avenues NW, and he wants to do what he can on the ANC to make them safer for pedestrians and cut back on the “frequent accidents” he sees on the roads.

“The ANC is not much more than a bully pulpit, but I want to try and use it to enact some change,” Abel says.

Abel may not be from D.C., but if he’s ready to take on a largely futile battle over slowing down cars on the ANC level, it sounds to LL like he’s about as steeped in D.C. politics as a person can possibly be. And that makes perfect sense, considering he’s not some stranger to the city even if he wasn’t born here; Abel says he first came to the city in 1999, just after his family immigrated from Ethiopia. 

Since getting his green card, he’s bounced around D.C. and the Maryland suburbs, attending the University of Maryland for three years before cycling through some odd jobs in the restaurant industry and gig economy. Abel says it was the pandemic that really pushed him to get involved in D.C. politics, and he began volunteering with the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America to encourage the Council to pass a resolution endorsing Medicare for All.

He later got involved in organizing efforts to pass Initiative 82 to end the tipped minimum wage and has since started working on environmental justices issues, too, helping to craft the legislation on the subject recently introduced by Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker. He’s recently re-enrolled at UMD to try and finish his degree in physics and economics, and he’s entertaining the idea of going to law school once that’s done.

In short, Abel doesn’t sound terribly different from most of the other people to get involved in D.C.’s lefty politics in recent years. Despite the dire predictions from Cheh and the Post that the noncitizen voting law would allow employees of hostile foreign governments to meddle in local affairs, most people who take advantage of these new rights will probably have stories that are awfully similar to Abel’s.

“The law itself clearly says you can’t claim voting residency in another country,” he observes. “I can’t register to vote in Ethiopia, which is where I’m a citizen. So the premise of someone from an embassy doing this, instead of people like me, is ridiculous.”

But the GOP has never let pesky things like facts and logic determine its agenda, so attacks on the policy are likely to continue even as the law remains in effect. The Republican-controlled House passed a disapproval resolution to block the bill (just as it did for the city’s criminal code revisions) earlier this year, but the measure died in the Senate. The GOP tried again by advancing legislation to repeal the law, alongside a host of other measures aimed at making voting more difficult, out of a House committee this summer.

The Committee on House Administration marked up that bill a second time Thursday in a bid to draw a bit more attention to it and generate some momentum for its ultimate passage. But a spokesperson for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s lone, non-voting representative in Congress, says she doesn’t expect the Democratic Senate to take it up anytime soon. Norton has also, thus far, been able to beat back efforts by Republicans to bar the city from spending any money to implement the noncitizen voting bill. 

The measure also needs to survive a federal lawsuit from Republican voters and an anti-immigration group challenging it on constitutional grounds. The city’s lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the case this summer, but the matter is still pending. 

But none of that has been enough to dissuade D.C. officials from preparing for the 2024 elections as if noncitizens will be participating. Board of Elections spokesperson Nick Jacobs says the agency is already accepting in-person registration from noncitizens and will launch an online process “no later than January 2024.” 

Abel believes it will require a robust outreach effort among undocumented immigrants and green-card holders to encourage others to follow in his footsteps, and he hopes to engage street vendors and other Ethiopian communities he’s in contact with. He expects it will help if he wins his ANC race, which will likely be decided next week when elections officials certify whether his petition signatures have survived any ballot challenges. 

But even with a new ANC on board, Abel is realistic about the uphill battle he faces in getting noncitizens interested in local elections. It’s hard enough getting lifelong D.C. residents interested in these low turnout races.

“Even though 50,000 [noncitizens] will be eligible to vote, we’re not going to get 50,000,” Abel says. “We’re going to try, but it’s probably not even going to be a significant number of voters being added to the voter roll…But what’s important is giving them readily available resources to educate themselves, so they can participate if they want to.”