Marcela Rosas immigrated to Southern California from Michoacan, Mexico, more than a decade ago in search of the American dream.
She envisioned a life with a home for her three children, educational opportunities and a voice in her community. But there’s one foundation of American life that Rosas, 52, doesn’t have access to: the right to vote.
Without the ability to elect local leaders, Rosas said she feels powerless to push for changes that would improve her family’s quality of life, citing issues such as rising housing costs and local taxes.
“If I have the opportunity to vote, I can choose who I want to represent me – someone who understands my needs and issues,” she said. “Not having the right to vote makes me feel isolated from my community.”
Rosas is one of thousands of Santa Ana residents who could get the chance to vote in local elections by 2028 if city voters pass a ballot measure in November that would grant limited voting rights to non-residents. The measure has been fiercely opposed by local residents and groups who argue that the right to vote is a privilege that should only be given to citizens.
The fight in Santa Ana comes as former President Trump, now the official GOP presidential nominee, and other Republicans across the country continue to stomp fears that immigrants are voting illegally in the U.S. and tipping the election in favor of Democrats, despite strong election oversight laws and decades of research disputing claims of widespread voter fraud.
The issue has come up repeatedly at this week’s Republican National Convention, most recently when former presidential candidate and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that a core Republican value is that “we believe you have to be a citizen in order to vote.”
Non-citizens include people who are permanently residing in the United States as well as those who are here illegally. They also include people with work permits, refugees, and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Some jurisdictions may have specific criteria that non-citizens must meet in order to vote in local elections.
At a press conference in May, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said without evidence that widespread foreign voter fraud was “unprecedented and poses a clear and immediate threat to the integrity of our election system.”
“If you weren’t concerned about drop boxes and counting mail-in ballots in 2020, you should certainly be concerned about illegal immigrants potentially voting in 2024,” he said.
The Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill this month requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, but federal law already bars foreign nationals from voting in presidential elections. Anyone who breaks the law and registers to vote in federal elections as a noncitizen could face prison time or deportation.
Still, federal law does not restrict states from setting their own local and statewide election rules, which could include allowing non-citizens to vote in select local elections such as school board or city council elections.
Fewer than two dozen cities have local laws granting voting rights to foreigners, and no state offers them the right to vote in statewide elections, said Ron Hejduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University who has studied and written about foreign voting rights.
Most of these cities are in Vermont and Maryland. Several jurisdictions in Massachusetts have also passed local foreign voting ordinances, but they remain invalid without state approval, Hejduk said. New York City passed a foreign voting law in 2021, but a New York judge struck it down as unconstitutional. A federal court in March dismissed a challenge to a Washington, D.C. law that allows foreigners to vote in local elections.
In California, San Francisco was the first city to give noncitizens some voting rights through the 2016 ballot measure Proposition N. That measure, which went into effect in 2018, gave parents of school children the right to vote in school board elections. Oakland voters approved a similar ballot measure for 2022, but the law has not yet taken effect.
In November, Santa Ana could become the third city to give noncitizens the right to vote in city council elections. The ballot measure differs from laws in San Francisco and Oakland that would give noncitizens the right to vote in local elections for mayor, city council and ballot measures.
Supporters say giving foreigners the right to vote is equality, giving people who pay taxes and contribute to their communities a say in local government. Santa Ana, a city of more than 310,000, is home to about 5,600 Vietnamese residents and 64,000 Latinos who are not U.S. citizens, said Tracy La, co-founder and executive director of VietRISE.
“There are a lot of people who are worried about the state of democracy in this country and whether democracy is under attack, but what we’re really worried about is, how can we call it a true democracy when there are so many people in our community who can’t actually vote,” La said.
Haydock said rules about who can vote in which elections vary from country to country. Some are specific to school committee elections, while others apply broadly to citywide elections. Some municipalities require voters to be legal permanent residents or have a work permit, while others allow any foreign national to vote.
But the idea held by Trump and other Republicans that immigrants vote freely and that Democrats are trying to use those votes to sway the election is a myth that has been “completely debunked by research after research,” Haydock said.
Not only are federal and state voting laws extremely strict, but immigrants also have a lot to lose by having their names on government rolls, experts say.
In many states, including California, that is the case, Joshua Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor who has studied local voting rights under state constitutions, explained in an email to The Times.
“Doing so does not violate the U.S. Constitution because there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits such conduct. It also does not violate state constitutions in states that have state constitutions that set minimum standards for voting eligibility,” he said, adding that it often comes down to the language of state constitutions allowing “all citizens” to vote or “only citizens” to vote.
Many states have passed constitutional amendments in recent years making it clear that only citizens have the right to vote, and several other states, including Kentucky and North Carolina, plan to put the issue on their November ballots.
Even in states that allow voting, there are usually restrictions on when and how foreigners can vote.
To vote in San Francisco school board elections, non-citizen voters must prove they are of legal voting age, a resident of the city, and the parent, guardian, or caregiver of a school-age child.
San Francisco city attorney David Chiu, who played a key role in passing the ballot measure, first as a civil rights attorney and then as a state legislator, said the law is crucial to ensuring that all parents “have a say in the direction of their children’s education, regardless of citizenship status.”
Chiu said San Francisco has strict rules about how foreigners can vote to ensure the integrity of its elections: Foreign voters receive special ballots that list only school board candidates, and they must re-enroll in the program for every election.
“I have never heard of a single case of a foreign national voting illegally in San Francisco,” Chiu said. “These allegations (of voter fraud) are completely unfounded and also misunderstand how our current voting system operates to ensure the integrity of our elections.”
Chiu later served as the city’s attorney, defending Proposition N in a lawsuit brought by conservative legal groups that sought to block the law. A San Francisco Superior Court judge initially found the law unconstitutional, but an appeals court overturned that ruling and allowed the program to continue. That ruling also applied to Oakland’s law, which was facing a similar legal challenge.
James Lacey, a lawyer and conservative commentator who led the lawsuits in San Francisco and Oakland, filed a separate lawsuit in May challenging the language used in the Santa Ana ballot measure.
“If there’s one important thing about citizenship, it’s the right to vote and the right to participate in local government politics in our country,” Lacey said. “When you give the right to vote to people who aren’t citizens, it devalues citizenship. It dilutes the voting rights of all citizens.”
The impact of the Foreign Voting Law remains unclear.
In the 2018 San Francisco School Board election, just 65 noncitizens registered to vote, and 59 turned out, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections. In 2020, that number dropped to 36 registered voters, and 31 turned out to vote.
When three San Francisco school board members were removed in a February 2022 recall election, the number of registered foreign voters swelled to 328, with 235 voting. In another election that fall, registration numbers dropped dramatically. In the past four school board elections, foreign voters made up only a small fraction of the total votes cast, more than 1.3 million.
According to Haydock, until 1926, foreign voting was commonplace in most states. Citizenship was less important than other markers of social success, such as race, sex, and class, so white, male landowners typically had access to the ballot box, regardless of citizenship status.
“The idea that voting is eternal and always fixed is wrong,” he said. “Voting is evolving. Democracy is evolving.”
