The Southern California city of Santa Ana has placed a controversial phrase on a ballot to allow non-citizens to vote. local elections, So far legal challenges to the phrase have been dismissed.
The Santa Ana City Council proposed a ballot measure in November asking voters to decide whether the city’s non-citizen residents, “including taxpayers and parents,” could participate in all municipal elections. However, conservative organizations, including the California Public Policy Foundation, later filed suit against the measure in Orange County Superior Court, arguing that the language is “illegally partisan” and would cast the ballot measure “in a more favorable light because it would highlight sympathetic groups of voters who would gain voting rights under the proposal,” According to the outlet LAist.
Earlier this month, a county judge sided with the California Public Policy Foundation and other opponents and told the city of Santa Ana to update the language on its ballot measure to make it more neutral.
In-spite of this, Santa Ana City Council The council voted last week to retain the controversial seven-word phrase, Politico reported. Council members who voted to keep the ballot measure in place said the American Civil Liberties Union had agreed to defend any further lawsuits.
A worker organizes a stack of mail-in ballots for ballot scanning at the Orange County Registrar’s Office in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Paul Bersbach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
“I think the language is fair: It’s simply describing who non-citizens are,” City Council member Johnathan Hernandez said during a meeting last week, according to Politico. “Non-citizens pay more than $145 million in taxes in Orange County today…Orange County would not be the county it is without non-citizens.”
Council member David Penaloza dissented, arguing that the city had gone beyond “neutral, adequate” terminology on the measure and used “hypocritical” language aimed at “influencing and swaying” voters.
He reportedly said the council had “used out of the blue language” when the measure was moving forward.
“I don’t know why it was done, but they included the word ‘parents,'” he said. “It’s being done so that when a person goes to the ballot box, it reads, ‘Oh yes, of course parents and taxpayers can vote.'”
James Lacey, a lawyer and activist involved in the suit, told Politico that while he is against noncitizens voting in elections, he does not oppose the issue being placed on the ballot in general.
“What they’re doing is sweetening the ballot by making positive statements, without question, in favor of voting,” he reportedly said. “That’s advocacy — you can’t have a fair election by doing that.”
Lacy also told LAist in early June that the measure’s controversial wording violates election code because “it biases the voter in a way that encourages them to vote ‘yes’ on this measure.”
Santa Ana City Councilman Jonathan Ryan Hernandez applauds during a council meeting presentation on April 19, 2021. He supports controversial wording on a ballot measure that would allow non-citizen parents and taxpayers to vote. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, but Illegal immigration reform And the Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 states that noncitizens are allowed to participate in other elections if they are “authorized to vote for such other purpose under the state constitution or statute or local ordinance.”
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In recent years other California cities, such as San Francisco and Oakland, have pursued efforts to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, including school board elections.
In 2016, a ballot measure known as Proposition N Passed in San Francisco, allowing non-citizen parents and guardians of children living in the city to vote in local school board elections.
Facing legal challenges, a San Francisco Superior Court judge later ruled that the measure was unconstitutional. The California Court of Appeals overturned that ruling last August, saying state and local governments, particularly charter cities, have the authority to impose their own election rules at the municipal level. Like San Francisco, Santa Ana is also a charter city.
A man walks to vote before the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana, California on “Super Tuesday” March 5, 2024. (FREDERICK J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
“I believe we can continue to challenge this issue of non-citizen voting, possibly with better results in the federal court system,” Lacy told LAist. “The California state court system, particularly the appellate system, is filled with really liberal Democratic judges.”
During a presidential election year, Republicans at the state and federal levels are pushing to reduce non-citizen voting and give states the authority to clean up their voter rolls.
In an interview with Fox News Digital last week, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen had called on Congress to enact reforms to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 after he learned that noncitizens in Alabama who came into contact with Medicaid or other state welfare agencies were being provided voter registration forms under the Biden administration’s broad interpretation of the law.
Last month, Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. If passed, this legislation would require states to obtain proof of citizenship — in person — when registering someone to vote, and would require states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.
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Voters in Missouri, South Carolina, Iowa, Kentucky, and Wisconsin will decide on ballot measures this fall to explicitly ban noncitizens from voting, according to Politico. More could do the same. Last week, North Carolina’s legislature advanced a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would clarify that only U.S. citizens who are at least 18 years old and meet other qualifications “shall be entitled to vote in any election.”
