Marcela Rosas emigrated from the Mexican state of Michoacán to Southern California more than a decade ago in search of the American dream.
She imagined a life with a home for her three children, educational opportunities and the chance to have a say in her community. There is one cornerstone of American life that Rosas, 52, has not had access to: voting.
Rosas feels powerless when she cannot elect local leaders and effect change that will improve her family’s quality of life, citing issues such as rising housing prices and local taxes.
“If I had the opportunity to vote, I could choose the people who would represent me — people who understand my needs and issues,” she said. “Without the right to vote, I feel separated from my community.”
Rosas is one of thousands of Santa Ana residents who could get the chance to vote in local elections in 2028 if the city’s voters approve a ballot measure in November that would give non-citizens limited voting rights. The measure has drawn fierce opposition from local residents and organizations who argue that voting is a privilege that should be reserved for citizens.
The battle in Santa Ana comes as former President Trump, now the GOP’s official presidential nominee, and other Republicans across the country continue to raise the specter of immigrants voting illegally in the United States to sway election outcomes in favor of Democrats — despite robust election oversight laws and decades of investigations refuting claims of widespread voter fraud.
The issue has been raised repeatedly at this week’s Republican National Convention, most recently by former presidential candidate and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said Tuesday that a fundamental GOP party value is “we believe you have to be a citizen to vote.”
Noncitizens range from those who are permanent residents of the United States to those who are undocumented. This can include individuals who have work permits, are refugees, or are here under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Depending on the jurisdiction, there are sometimes certain criteria that a noncitizen must meet in order to vote in local elections.
At a press conference in May, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said, without any evidence, that widespread fraud by non-citizens in elections was “unprecedented and posed a clear and present danger to the integrity of our electoral system.”
“Even if you weren’t concerned about ballot boxes and mail-in ballot collection in 2020, you should certainly be concerned about illegal aliens potentially voting in 2024,” he said.
The Republican-led House this month passed a bill requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration, even though federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in presidential elections. Those who violate the law and register to vote in federal elections without citizenship status could be imprisoned or deported.
However, federal law does not prohibit states from establishing their own local and state election rules. This could, for example, allow noncitizens to vote in limited local elections, such as school board or city council elections.
Read more: Non-citizen voting, already illegal in federal elections, becomes centerpiece of 2024 GOP message
Fewer than two dozen cities have passed local laws granting noncitizens the right to vote, according to Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University who has studied and written books about noncitizen voting rights. No state allows noncitizens to vote in statewide elections.
Most of those cities are in Vermont and Maryland. A handful of jurisdictions in Massachusetts have also passed local noncitizen voting ordinances, though they remain dormant without state approval, Hayduk said. New York City passed a noncitizen voting law in 2021 that a New York judge subsequently struck down as unconstitutional. A federal judge in March dismissed a challenge to a Washington, D.C., law that allows noncitizens to vote in local elections.
In California, San Francisco became the first city to grant non-citizens the right to vote through a 2016 ballot measure called Proposition N. The measure, which went into effect in 2018, gave parents of schoolchildren the chance to vote in school board elections. Voters in Oakland approved a similar ballot measure in 2022, though the law has not yet passed.
In November, Santa Ana could become the third city to grant noncitizens the right to vote in municipal elections. The ballot measure differs from San Francisco and Oakland’s laws, granting noncitizens the right to vote in local elections for mayor, council members and ballot measures.
Supporters say allowing noncitizens to vote is about equality and giving those who pay taxes and contribute to a community a say in their local government. Santa Ana, with a population of more than 310,000, is home to about 5,600 Vietnamese and 64,000 Latinos who are not U.S. citizens, said Tracy La, co-founder and executive director of VietRISE.
“There are many people who are concerned about the state of democracy in this country and whether democracy is under threat. But what we are really interested in is how it can be a real democracy when there are so many people in our community who cannot vote,” La said.
The rules for who can vote and for what race vary by state, Hayduk said. Some are limited to school board elections, while others apply more generally to citywide elections. Some local jurisdictions require voters to be legal permanent residents or have a work permit, while others allow any noncitizen to vote.
But the idea by Trump and other Republicans that immigrants vote carte blanche and that Democrats use those ballots to influence elections is a myth that “has been debunked by countless studies,” Hayduk said.
According to experts, not only are national and regional election laws extremely strict, but immigrants also have much to lose by putting their names on government documents.
Read more: Many OC residents deny Trump’s election results, which polls say could influence key races
Many states, such as California, allow charter cities to set their own voting rules to enfranchise voters without citizenship, Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who has researched local voting rights in state constitutions, explained in an email to The Times.
“This is not a violation of the U.S. Constitution, as there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits this practice. Nor is it a violation of the state constitution in states where the Constitution sets a minimum voting right,” he said, adding that it often comes down to whether the Constitution gives “every citizen” the right to vote, or “only a citizen.”
In recent years, many states have passed constitutional amendments to explicitly state that only citizens may vote. Several other states, including Kentucky and North Carolina, will put the issue before voters in November.
Even in states where this is allowed, there are typically restrictions on how and when non-citizens can access the polls.
To vote in San Francisco School Board elections, non-U.S. citizen voters must prove that they are of legal voting age, that they reside in the city, and that they are the parent, guardian or custodian of a school-age child.
San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu, who played a key role in passing the ballot measure, first as a civil rights attorney and later during his tenure in the state Assembly, said the law is crucial to ensuring that all parents “have a say in the direction of their children’s education, regardless of their nationality.”
Chiu said there are strict rules for how noncitizens vote in San Francisco to ensure the program fully protects the integrity of elections. Noncitizen voters receive special ballots that include only school board candidates, and they must re-enroll in the program after each election.
“I am not aware of any incident of a noncitizen voting illegally in San Francisco,” Chiu said. “These (election fraud) claims are simply not based in reality … and I would also argue that they misunderstand the operational aspects of current voting programs that protect the integrity of the election.”
Chiu later defended Proposition N as city attorney against a lawsuit brought by a conservative legal group seeking to block the law. A San Francisco Superior Court judge initially ruled that the law violated the state constitution, before an appeals court overturned that decision and allowed the program to proceed. The ruling also applied to Oakland’s law, which faced a similar legal challenge.
Attorney and conservative pundit James Lacy, who led the lawsuits in San Francisco and Oakland, filed another lawsuit in May challenging the language used in the Santa Ana ballot.
“If there’s one thing we have that’s important in our citizenship, it’s the ability to vote and participate in the body politic of our communities in our country,” Lacy said. “When a non-citizen is allowed to vote, it diminishes the value of citizenship. It dilutes the voice of all citizens.”
Read more: Within the far-right plan to use the Civil Rights Act to disrupt the 2024 elections
The impact of the voting rights legislation for non-citizens is still unclear.
In 2018, just 65 noncitizens registered to vote in San Francisco’s school board elections, and 59 turned in ballots, according to the city’s Department of Elections. Those numbers dropped to 36 registered voters in 2020, with 31 ballots cast.
When three San Francisco school boards were purged in February 2022, registered noncitizen voters swelled to 328, and 235 people voted. Registrations fell dramatically for another election that fall. Noncitizen ballots in the last four school board elections have accounted for a fraction of the more than 1.3 million votes cast.
Until 1926, noncitizen voting was common in most states, Hayduk said. Citizenship was less important than other social markers of success, such as race, gender and class, meaning that white male landowners, regardless of citizenship status, generally had access to the ballot box.
“The idea that the vote is eternal, that it is always fixed, is wrong,” he said. “It evolves. Democracy evolves.”
Sign up for Essential California and receive news, features and recommendations from the LA Times and other sources in your inbox six days a week.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
