Maryland
Immigrant Voting Rights Campaigns
In December 2016, Hyattsville granted immigrant voting rights and soon after Mount Rainer followed suit in January 2017. Chevy Chase became the 11th town in Maryland to grant voting rights to noncitizens in 2018.
Maryland’s state constitution and election code allow municipalities, except for Baltimore, gives to govern their own elections beyond state qualifications. For example, the Barnesville town charter defines qualified voters as “having resided therein for six months previous to any town election and being eighteen years of age”
The charter of Chevy Chase Section 3 states, “‘Qualified Voter’ shall mean any person who is a resident of Chevy Chase Section 3, without regard to citizenship, and is at least eighteen (18) years of age.”
Research on Immigrant Voting Rights
Research shows that immigrants vote in significant numbers in some districts, on par with citizen neighbors in some cases, contributing to electoral and policy outcomes
I. In Takoma Park Maryland, immigrant political engagement has been robust, with noncitizens voted a nearly comparable rates as citizen voters in districts where they were concentrated during the 1990s, though their turnout declined after September 11th when anti-immigrant sentiment and surveillance grew and as federal enforcement grew.
II. More recently, however, noncitizen voting has increased in places. For example, the Hyattsville Maryland election’s office devoted significant staff time to voter outreach, education, and registration. (They have four full time staff and one part-time staff person for the town’s total population of 20,000).
III. They employed use of social media to get the word out, especially paid locally-targeted adverts in Spanish on Facebook, introduced same-day voter registration for local elections, and conducted a fully mail-in election for the first time that entailed hiring a private company (Ballot Scout) to support mailings and follow-up to increase transparency – all of which boosted their overall voter turnout by almost 100% from previous local-only elections.
Maryland’s election administrators keep two separate voter registration lists: the state keeps a list of citizen voters for state and federal elections and local city clerks keep a separate list of noncitizen voters who can vote in local elections (they also have the list of their local citizens).
Election administrators have developed two types of voter registration forms and use them to draw up the two different lists. For local elections— where both citizens and noncitizens vote—the clerks merge the two lists. In this way, the only people who know citizens from noncitizen voters are the election clerks. From the vantage point of an observer, all voters look the same.
After a local election, however, noncitizen voter cards are removed from the voter lists and kept separately. Only citizens will appear on the voter lists for elections of state and federal offices.
Similar systems are in place for the other five jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections in Maryland. Towns in Maryland have successfully implemented resident municipal voting for more than two decades without reporting incidents of illegal voting, successfully building a firewall between local elections that occur in different years than in state and federal races.
Administrative Features of
Immigrant Voting Measures
Voter Education and Outreach
Hyattsville Maryland hired an additional full-time staff person in 2018 to do voter outreach, voter education, create new materials, and to help with implementation. They also hired a full-time bilingual Communications Specialist to help with outreach, especially to Spanish speakers. Hyattsville has a total population of only 18,000 people but like San Francisco, it about one third of its total population are foreign born (36%), and about 23% are noncitizens (13% are naturalized citizens). In 2018, Hyattsville expended approximately $5 per resident to foster immigrant voting. San Francisco, by contrast, spent about $3 per resident to implement Prop N in 2018.
In 2020, the election’s office in Hyattsville devoted significant staff time to voter outreach, education, and registration. They have four full-time staff and one part-time staff person for the town’s total population of 20,000. In 2020, they employed use of social media to get the word out, especially paid locally-targeted adverts in Spanish on Facebook, introduced same-day voter registration for local elections, and conducted a fully mail-in election for the first time that entailed hiring a private company (Ballot Scout) to support mailings and follow-up to increase transparency – all of which boosted their overall voter turnout by almost 100% from previous local-only elections.
Contact us.
Ron Hayduk
rhayduk@sfsu.edu
Please email us if you have any questions or any information that you would like to share with us.