Voters in one Orange County city will weigh in on a measure to expand voting rights for immigrants as Republicans work to curtail the practice nationally.

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Their opponents, too, are eager for what happens in Santa Ana to be noticed beyond Orange County, a traditional conservative stronghold that has been politically and demographically transformed over the last generation by migration from Asia and Latin America. Measure DD’s defeat, said Orange County-based conservative lawyer and activist James Lacy, will be “a dagger plunged into the heart of the nationwide movement for noncitizen voting.”

Battling over the noncitizen’s ballot

Until about a century ago, noncitizens regularly voted in American elections, uncontroversial in a country founded on ideals of “no taxation without representation.” Throughout the late 18th and much of the 19th century, noncitizens could even be elected to local office and territorial legislatures. The right to vote was often used as a lure to draw people to newer states and territories eager for population growth.

“Even from the get-go, the idea of immigrant voting was seen not as a substitute for citizenship but a pathway to it — the idea that it could facilitate the newcomers’ civic education and attachment to their new lands and communities, and eventual citizenship,” said Ron Hayduk, a professor at San Francisco State University who has written extensively about the history of noncitizen voting in the U.S.

But a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries prompted states to do away with the practice. As of 1924, no state currently allows it. California’s constitution requires that one be a U.S. citizen aged 18 or older and in good standing otherwise (meaning not currently serving a felony sentence in prison) to vote in elections for state office.

Noncitizen voters were “factored into the calculations by the parties and the candidates, as well as determining winners and losers,” Hayduk said. “And that’s partly why it came under some contestation over time … as the number and the kinds of immigrants increased and changed.”

In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring anyone registering to vote in federal elections to certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are a U.S. citizen. The penalties for violating that law can be steep: Noncitizens who illegally cast a ballot can face not only a fine and prison time, but also deportation and the denial of future legal status.

But neither federal nor state law has anything to say about whether noncitizens can vote in local-level elections. That ambiguity has led nearly 20 cities across the country, including in the District of Columbia and Vermont, to give noncitizens some voting rights. (Takoma Park, Maryland, was the first to do so, in the early 1990s, but most of the noncitizen voting laws have come from a new wave of measures in the last few years.)

In 2016, San Francisco voters amended the city’s charter to permit noncitizens with children under 18 to vote in school board elections. Oakland voters approved a similar measure in 2022, although it was subsequently challenged in court and has yet to go into effect. (The suit was dismissed by a county court.) A state appeals court ruling last year to uphold San Francisco’s amendment inspired members of the Santa Ana city council to pursue something similar, to take effect by 2028.

The movement for noncitizen suffrage has triggered a backlash from Republicans who have moved to explicitly ban the practice in elections at all levels. Six states have already passed constitutional amendments explicitly banning noncitizens from voting in their elections, and eight more — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — are voting on similar measures this fall.

“This is really a common-sense fix to an issue that might never become an issue, but it’s a lot easier to handle these things in a proactive manner than to react to them if they do,” Kentucky state Rep. Michael Meredith, who co-sponsored the constitutional amendment in his state, told local media this fall.

There is no evidence that noncitizens are casting ballots in federal elections, but former President Donald Trump and his allies regularly assert it is as a component of allegations that only mass election fraud could cause his defeat on Nov. 5. “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump claimed at his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. Johnson has said, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.”

Santa Ana’s Measure DD has been caught up in that maelstrom. In a city that declared itself a sanctuary city in response to Trump’s election in 2016, local supporters of the measure recognize that their success or failure will be watched beyond city limits — and that victory would serve as at least a small counterbalance to the noncitizen voting bans that may pass elsewhere in the country next month.

“A lot of national right-wing groups have been very against this because if it does pass, it will be historic,” said Jannah Pante, a 30-year-old union staffer who came from neighboring Anaheim to volunteer for the measure. “I think people see Orange County as the Trump town of California. … If this passes in the heart of the conservative county, I think it will very much inspire others to say, ‘We can also do this.’”

‘Is this election fraud?’

Measure DD would amend Santa Ana’s charter to effectively waive California’s citizenship requirement in the city’s rules about who is eligible to vote. The proposal makes no distinction between noncitizen residents based on their legal status, and leaves questions about defining residency to the city council. It would move responsibility for overseeing local elections from county to city government, but does not explain how it would administer them for two distinct classes of voters when both federal and local offices appear on the same ballot, as they will for Santa Ana’s mayoral election in November.

Shortly after the city council voted to place the amendment on the ballot last fall, it faced a legal challenge over seven words included in the original text of the amendment. Voters would have been asked whether noncitizens, “including those who are taxpayers and parents,” should get the right to vote in local elections.

But Lacy, who had filed previous lawsuits against San Francisco and Oakland’s noncitizen voting amendments, argued successfully in court that Santa Ana’s language reflected bias in favor of the measure, and a judge ordered the city council to remove it.

Even if the reference to taxpayers and parents was struck from the official ballot language, backers of Measure DD have worked to make that point as they campaign for the measure. They argue noncitizens pay more than $100 million in taxes in Santa Ana, and that they deserve a say in the local government structures that impact their daily lives.

By passing the measure, “we are reclaiming a right that immigrants had and our communities had … for the majority of the history of the United States,” Rigo Rodriguez, a member of the city’s school board, said at the Yes on DD canvassing kickoff.

Rodriguez was speaking from the parking lot of the Centro Cultural de Mexico in downtown Santa Ana, where volunteers handed out steaming cups of coffee and pan dulce to supporters training to canvass for the first time. Struggling to shield themselves from the beating sun, they practiced how to respond to common concerns voters might raise in doorstep conversations.

“‘Hey, I watch Fox News,’” one volunteer proposed. “‘Is this election fraud?’”

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