U.S. Voters May Have No Constitutionally Protected Right to Elect Mayors

Civil rights attorneys knew that Public Act 436, Michigan’s current emergency manager law, was likely illegal and unconstitutional way back when it was first enacted, in December 2012. This was well before the Flint water crisis, which not only exposed many of the emergency management system’s failings, but also the real life-or-death consequences of them. In March 2014, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights and The Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice filed a lawsuit against it, outlining the many constitutional rights the law violates—not least of which is the right to vote.

Public Act 436 transfers all governing powers from mayors and city councils to an appointed emergency manager for cities that Michigan has determined to be in financial crisis. This effectively erases residents’ voting rights in those cities, the lawsuit argued, since the politicians who residents elected to run the city no longer have any authority. A U.S. District Court disagreed, however, in its November 2014 ruling. Judge George Caram Steeh wrote that there was nothing wrong with Michigan replacing an elected mayor in a city like Flint with an un-elected, state-appointed custodian because city residents have no real voting rights in this manner. From Steeh’s order: