Op-Ed in Press Herald: History of voting rights guides debate on Portland’s noncitizens

History reveals that who gets to vote and how much our votes matter have less to do with citizenship and more to do with who wields power and who is left disenfranchised. It’s a history of progress and the expansion of our body politic as we struggled with our collective conscience, and as our vision of what and who our representative democracy truly represents changed with the times.