Santa Ana voters will be asked to decide in next year’s Nov. 5 election whether noncitizens will be allowed to vote in local elections by 2028.
Councilmembers Johnathan Hernandez, Benjamin Vazquez, Jessie Lopez and Thai Viet Phan voted to place the question before voters during the general election. Councilmembers Phil Bacerra and David Penaloza, and Mayor Valerie Amezcua, voted against the item on Tuesday.
“Voting in a local election is not an unlawful act if the applicant is eligible to vote under the relevant law,” Hernandez said, quoting a policy from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “What is being asked today is for the voters to be the deciders.”
Noncitizen residents make up about 24% of Santa Ana’s population, Vazquez and Hernandez said, quoting from U.S. Census Bureau statistics. And immigrant residents, including noncitizens, in Orange County contributed $10.5 billion in taxes in 2018, according to the American Immigration Council.
But noncitizens can’t vote in the local elections that affect their everyday lives, said Vazquez and Hernandez.
If voters say yes, the measure would mean the city’s charter would be amended to authorize and implement noncitizen voting in municipal elections.
“There’s a disenfranchised group of 60,000 immigrants in Santa Ana,” Vazquez said. “We are ignoring some of the people who are in the most need. It’s not going to be easy; we never said it was. We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”
Penaloza said he thought the possibility of allowing noncitizens to vote was a “valid” discussion to have, but he did not support moving forward with placing a measure before voters because of lingering questions he has about the city’s ability to expand voting and how that might impact a person’s ability to apply for citizenship.
“We are throwing this to city staff with absolutely zero direction,” Penaloza said. “Our city attorney and our city manager at the last meeting asked multiple times who exactly would this apply to. How would we register people in the city to vote? What is the residency requirement? How would this election be handled? Who would handle the processing of these ballots? Who would mail out the ballots? Nobody up here had that discussion.”
Phan says the city should first learn if voters even want noncitizen voting in Santa Ana before it finalizes those other details.
“If the voters of the city of Santa Ana don’t want it, then we won’t have it,” Phan said. “I do think that it’s important to hear from our residents on this specific issue before we go and hire consultants and things like that. … If you do want it, perfect, we’ll make it work because that’s what our residents have demanded.”
It isn’t the first time Santa Ana leaders have considered extending voting rights to the city’s noncitizens. The matter of including noncitizen voting in the city’s charter was first discussed in July 2022, but the council at the time was advised that there wasn’t enough time to conduct the necessary research before placing it on the ballot.
Currently, 17 jurisdictions in the country allow noncitizen residents to legally vote in local elections. In San Francisco, a state appeals court in August upheld its charter amendment that allows noncitizens to cast ballots in school board elections.
“After that first direction that was given by the council, we did research the legal issues, but that was pre-Lacy, so we were prepared to advise on the legal issues,” City Attorney Sonia Carvalho said, referring to that case.
Carvalho said that at the time, she and her team were not given direction to hire a consultant to research and create an implementation plan.
If approved by voters, the proposal is certain to draw legal scrutiny, Carvalho said, and the City Council should prepare to budget an initial $500,000 for legal costs.
“I think that would potentially take us through some initial challenges. If it goes (through) multiple levels of appeals, I could see maybe doubling that,” Carvalho said. “I can tell you that with previous policies that the Council has proceeded with, for example, our rent stabilization and things that are a little more progressive, we have three cases right now.”
The ballot measure is expected to cost about $8,500.
Other Orange County cities are also poised to present election-related questions to voters next year. Irvine residents, for example, will decide if they want to increase the size of their council and move to by-district elections.
