Against Non-citizen Electors
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New Zealand allows both citizens and non-citizen, permanent residents to vote in national elections, but only citizens can be members of Parliament. NZ's electoral system therefore violates a principle I call 'Lincoln's Law' (LL): that the set of electors should be the same as the set of possible representatives (or that anyone who's entitled to vote should be entitled to stand for and hold office, and conversely). The conclusion that there should be no non-citizen electors follows from LL together with what we'll call the 'Bedrock Requirement on Representatives' (BRR): that only citizens should be able to be representatives. We endorse that argument. The defence of LL in Section 4 is the core of the essay, and in particular we defend LL against the objection that in any representative democracy all Lincoln-style talk of government 'by the people' is at best romantic hyperbole.
