Marcela Rosas immigrated to Southern California from the Mexican state of Michoacán 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 ability to have a say in her community. There is one pillar of American life that Rosas, 52, has been unable to access: the vote.
Without the ability to elect local leaders, Rosas says she feels powerless to push for changes that could improve her family’s quality of life, citing issues like rising housing costs and local taxes.
“If I had the opportunity to vote, I would be able to choose the people I want to represent me, people who understand my needs and my issues,” she said. “Without the right to vote, I feel segregated from my community.”
Rosas is one of thousands of people living in Santa Ana who could have the opportunity to vote in the 2028 local elections if city voters approve a measure in November that gives noncitizens limited voting power. The measure has generated intense opposition from residents and organizations that say voting is a privilege that should be granted only to citizens.
The battle in Santa Ana comes as former President Trump, now the official Republican presidential nominee, and other Republicans across the country continue to raise the specter of immigrants voting illegally in the United States to alter the outcome of elections in favor of Democrats, despite robust election surveillance laws and decades of studies questioning claims of rampant voter fraud.
The issue has come up repeatedly during this week's Republican National Convention, most recently by former presidential candidate and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said Tuesday that a core value of the Republican Party is “we believe you have to be a citizen to vote.”
Non-citizens range from people who are permanent residents of the United States to undocumented individuals. They can include those who have work permits, are refugees, or are here under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Depending on the jurisdiction, there are sometimes certain criteria a non-citizen must meet in order to vote in local elections.
During a press conference in May, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said without evidence that widespread voter fraud among noncitizens was “an unprecedented problem and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system.”
“Even if you weren’t worried about drop boxes and mail-in ballot collection in 2020, you should definitely be worried about illegal immigrants being able to vote in 2024,” he said.
The Republican-led House of Representatives 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 break the law and register to vote without citizenship status in federal elections can face jail or deportation.
Still, federal law does not restrict states from setting their own state and local election rules, which could include allowing noncitizens to vote in limited local elections, such as those for school boards or city councils.
According to Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University who has studied and written books on noncitizen voting rights, fewer than two dozen cities have passed local laws granting voting rights to noncitizens. No state allows noncitizens to vote in state elections.
Most of those cities are in Vermont and Maryland. A handful of jurisdictions in Massachusetts have also passed local ordinances on noncitizen voting, though they remain dormant without state approval, Hayduk said. New York City passed a noncitizen voting law in 2021 that a New York judge later struck down as unconstitutional. In March, a federal judge rejected a challenge to a Washington, D.C., law that allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections.
In California, San Francisco became the first city to grant non-citizens some voting rights through a 2016 ballot measure called Proposition N. The measure, which took effect in 2018, gave parents of school-aged children the opportunity to vote in school board elections. Oakland voters approved a similar ballot measure in 2022, though the law has not yet been enacted.
In November, Santa Ana could become the third city to grant non-citizens the right to vote in municipal elections. The ballot measure differs from laws in San Francisco and Oakland, which grant non-citizens the right to vote in local elections for mayor, council members and ballot measures.
Proponents of the measure argue that allowing noncitizens to vote is a matter of equality and giving a voice in local government to those who pay taxes and contribute to a community. In Santa Ana, which has a population of more than 310,000, there are about 5,600 Vietnamese residents and 64,000 Latinos who are not U.S. citizens, according to Tracy La, co-founder and executive director of VietRISE.
“There are a lot of people who are concerned about the state of our democracy in this country and whether democracy is under attack, but for us what we’re really concerned about is how can it be a true democracy if there are so many people in our community who can’t actually vote,” La said.
Rules about who can vote and by what race vary across the country, Hayduk said. Some are limited to school board races, while others apply more generally to municipal elections. Some local jurisdictions require voters to be legal permanent residents or have work permits, while others allow any noncitizen to cast a ballot.
But the idea by Trump and other Republicans that immigrants are voting carte blanche and that Democrats are using those ballots to influence elections is a myth that has been “soundly debunked by study after study,” Hayduk said.
Experts say that not only are national and state election laws extremely strict, but immigrants have much to lose by putting their names on government records.
Many states, such as California, allow charter cities to create their own election rules to enfranchise noncitizen voters, said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied local voting rights under state constitutions, in an email to The Times.
“Doing so does not violate the U.S. Constitution since there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the practice, and it does not violate the state constitution in states with state constitutional language that sets a floor for voter eligibility,” he said, adding that it often comes down to whether state constitutional language authorizes “every citizen” to vote, or “only a citizen.”
In recent years, a wave of states have passed constitutional amendments to make explicit that only citizens can vote, and several others, including Kentucky and North Carolina, will put the question before voters on the November ballot.
Even in states that allow the practice, there are typically restrictions on how and when noncitizens have access to the ballot.
To vote in San Francisco school board elections, non-citizen voters must prove that they are of legal voting age, are a resident of the city, and are a parent, guardian, or caregiver of a school-aged child.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, who was instrumental in winning passage of the ballot measure, first as a civil rights attorney and later during his tenure in the state Assembly, said the law is critical to ensuring that all parents “have a say in the direction of their children's education, regardless of citizenship.”
Chiu said there are strict rules governing non-citizen voting in San Francisco to ensure the program fully protects the integrity of the election. Non-citizen voters receive special ballots that only list school board candidates and must re-enroll in the program after each election.
“I am not aware of any incident where a foreign national cast an illegal ballot in San Francisco,” Chiu said. “These allegations (of voter fraud) are simply not based in reality … and I would also argue that they fail to understand the operational aspects of current voting programs that protect the integrity of elections.”
Chiu later defended Proposition N as the city’s 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 had violated the state Constitution, before an appeals court reversed that decision and allowed the program to continue. The ruling also applied to Oakland’s law, which faced a similar legal challenge.
Conservative attorney and 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 measure.
“If we have anything important in our citizenship, it is the ability to vote and participate in the political body of our localities in our nation,” Lacy said. “When you allow a non-citizen to vote, you diminish the value of citizenship. You dilute the vote of all citizens.”
The impact of the laws on non-citizen voting remains unclear.
In 2018, just 65 noncitizen residents registered to vote in San Francisco school board elections, and 59 of them cast ballots, according to the city’s Elections Department. Those numbers dropped to 36 registered voters in 2020, with 31 ballots cast.
When three San Francisco school board members were removed from office in a recall election in February 2022, registered noncitizen voters increased to 328 and 235 people voted. Registration numbers dropped dramatically in another election that fall. Noncitizen votes in the past four school board elections accounted for a fraction of the more than 1.3 million total votes cast.
Until 1926, noncitizen voting was common in most states, Hayduk said. Citizenship mattered less than other social indicators of success, such as race, gender and class, meaning white landowners, regardless of citizenship status, generally had access to the ballot box.
“This idea that voting is eternal, that it has always been fixed, is incorrect,” he said. “It is evolving. Democracy is evolving.”
