Immigrant voting and connections with Vote 16

Vote 16 shares challenges and partners with other modern American suffrage movements. We are excited to explore connections between Vote 16 and work on voting rights for resident non-citizens.

Resident non-citizens historically have had the right to vote in the Untied States.

Immigrant voting, or the right to vote for resident non-citizens, strikes at the heart of the struggle for immigrant inclusion. Although resident non-citizen voting was the norm rather than the exception in the history of the United States, voting has been largely restricted to citizens since 1926. In the past, non-citizen immigrants voted in significant numbers and helped advance anti-slavery causes, labor rights, and decided the difference between winners and losers in elections. The elimination of “alien suffrage,” as it was called historically, left non-citizens with a diminished political voice despite having a significant stake in policies that touch every aspect of life.

All states that have had some form of resident non-citizen voting are marked red on this map for the period in which they had that policy.

Municipalities that control voting eligibility have led a recent resurgence in voting rights for resident non-citizens. In some cases, these are the same places leading the way on Vote 16.

In the last few decades, several localities have rekindled debates over immigrant membership in the political community by allowing non-citizen residents to vote. For example, San Francisco has allowed non-citizen parents to vote for school board members in multiple elections since 2018. Ten cities in Maryland - including 5 that have also lowered the voting age to 16 - have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. Recently three towns in Vermont and Washington D.C. restored resident non-citizen voting for municipal elections as well. Several municipalities are currently considering expanding non-citizen voting rights, including in Massachusetts, Illinois, Maine, and California.

Figure 2:  Immigrant Parent Voting Collaborative celebrates their accomplishments in 2019

There are opportunities for Vote 16 USA to learn from peer networks working on resident immigrant voting.

Chinese for Affirmative Action is an Asian American civil rights organization that works across multiple issue areas, including economic justice, immigrant rights, and community safety. We collaborate with other immigrant organizations to win, implement, and defend resident immigrant voting. In San Francisco, we anchor the Immigrant Parent Voting Collaborative (IPVC), a consortium of eight community-based organizations with collective capacity in over 10 languages. The IPVC has been a major partner with the City and County of San Francisco to conduct outreach, express community needs, and strengthen protections around resident immigrant voting by working with city agencies. We also play a leadership role in the California Local Voting Coalition, a statewide coalition of community-based organizations seeking to expand resident immigrant voting. In addition to our work on suffrage for residents who are not citizens, we conduct in-language voter outreach and distribute our voter guide to Chinese-speaking voters for upcoming elections.

We are eager to learn from and collaborate with the Vote 16 community. Potential touch points include:

• Larger conversations about political inclusion and an intersectional approach to expanding suffrage

• Sharing learnings around political campaigns, including narrative change and message testing

• Sharing best practices on implementing expanded voting rights and working with government partners

• Research on the impacts of expanding voting rights

For more information on immigrant voting, please see

• Our report on immigrant voting in SF: https://caasf.org/immigrant-voting/ 

• Professor Ron Hayduk’s immigrant voting resource page: https://www.immigrantvotingrights.com/

For collaboration opportunities, please reach out to Annette Wong, Managing Director of Programs (awong@caasf.org).

Helen Ho is the Research and Evaluation Manager at Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Annette Wong is Managing Director of Programs at Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Ron Hayduk is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University and the author of Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States.