Research
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. New Report — “Immigrant Voting and the Movement for Inclusion in San Francisco,” published by Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), SEPTEMBER 2023.
Do immigrants vote? How are laws implemented? What are their impacts?
Election Administration and Voter Participation
New York City
Voter participation in New York City’s Community School Board Elections varied; some districts experienced turnout by immigrants nearly on par with citizen voters, while other districts saw anemic turnout during the 30 years they existed.
Election Administration
NYC’s Community School Board Elections were jointly administered by the NYC Board of Education and the NYC Board of Elections. The NYC Board of Education notified all parents of their eligibility to vote and provided voter registration forms to every parent. The Board of Elections printed ballots, trained and staffed poll sites, and administered the elections.
New York City’s new law, which was crafted in consultation with immigrant organizations, grants voting rights to more than 800,000 Legal Permanent Residents and people with work visas. It does not enfranchise the undocumented.
NYC’ elections take place in years that don’t include state or federal elections, which can help insulate immigrant voters from mistakenly voting in a state or federal election. Municipalities in Maryland also take place in “off” years (i.e., non-state and federal election years).
NYC’s law directs the NYC Board of Elections to create a new "municipal voter registration form" and keep list of those registered for municipal elections. These voters would not appear on voter registration lists for state and federal elections, which similarly helps insulate immigrant voters. If and when an immigrant naturalizes AND registers to vote for state and federal elections, their municipal registration would become invalid.
Maryland
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.
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 which boosted immigrant voter turnout from the previous election.
Election Administration and New Legal Mandates
Election officials everywhere have had to develop procedures to meet new mandates, including to accommodate people with disabilities (ADA), language minorities, new requirements for voter registration and voting (the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote Act of 2002), pandemic related changes such as mail voting – all of which required adjustments to election administrative tasks and/or developing new procedures to inform eligible residents and register voters, train election personnel, as well as count and certify election results. Election administrators can similarly modify or adopt new procedures to effectively implement new immigrant voting laws. Such changes typically are most successfully implemented if done in partnership with impacted community groups and voting rights organizations.
Common Objections to Immigrant Voting Rights by Opponents and Responses by Advocates.
Globally Campaigns
45 countries allow immigrant voting, at the local, regional and national levels ( Journal of International Migration and Immigrant Integration, 2019; and VotingRightsForAll).
Contact us.
Ron Hayduk
rhayduk@sfsu.edu
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