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| Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register via AP |
This city of nearly 310,000 people isn’t well known as a liberal hotbed like a pair of major Golden State cities about a seven-hour drive north, San Francisco and Oakland. That may change after Election Day.
Santa Ana, Orange County’s second-most populous city after Disneyland-based Anaheim, is set to host a Nov. 5 ballot measure on whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote in municipal elections. It’s no academic matter in a city where an estimated quarter of the local population are noncitizens. Santa Ana is four-fifths Hispanic or Latino and was characterized in a 2016 New York Times story as the “face of a new California, a state where Latinos have more influence in everyday life — electorally, culturally and demographically — than almost anywhere else in the country.”
Proponents say allowing noncitizens to vote is about parity and giving those who pay taxes and contribute to a community a say in their local government. Some critics contend that preventing noncitizens from casting ballots reduces the risk of fraud and increases confidence in American democracy.
The measure in Santa Ana, about 34 miles south of Los Angeles, may very well pass. It will share a ballot with the presidential race and a slew of downballot contests in the nation’s leading Democratic state.
That would likely trigger a court fight and raise the profile of an issue other opponents say is blatantly unconstitutional.
“Only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections. It’s a shame this even has to be said,” Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) posted on X on July 5 about the subject generally.
In California, San Francisco became the first city to grant noncitizens some voting rights via a 2016 ballot measure called Proposition N. The measure, which went into effect in 2018, granted parents of schoolchildren the chance to vote in school board races. Oakland voters approved a similar ballot measure in 2022, though the law has not been enacted.
A budding controversy --->READ MORE HERE
Ahead of the presidential election, one organization is working to educate state election officials on the law when it comes to people who recently entered the country trying to cast a ballot.
America First Legal Executive Director Gene Hamilton says there is a law, which is regulated by the Department of Homeland Security, that can be used to keep illegal immigrants off of voter rolls.
Hamilton told journalist Megyn Kelly how there are “millions upon millions of illegal aliens” who have entered the United States over the last few years and that it only takes a couple of thousand of these people to get registered to vote and change the election outcome in swing states like Arizona or Georgia. As such, he discussed a section in the Immigration and Nationality Act that states can use to secure their elections, as states or local governments can receive information from DHS “to verify or ascertain the citizenship states of any individual in their jurisdiction” under this law.
“And so what the DHS is doing is that they’ve been telling the states and local governments, ‘Hey, you have to use the SAVE database and you have to use this alien registration number as the query. Oh, and by the way, DHS charges the states and localities to use it,’” Hamilton said on Thursday’s episode of The Megyn Kelly Show. “But there is a separate provision of law that no one was using up until recently that says that, actually, the states are entitled to receive this information as a matter of law, and it’s about any individual, and it’s to ascertain or to verify their citizenship or immigration status for any purpose authorized under law.”
Kelly questioned if state leadership would be willing to look into using this, arguing that only Democratic states would be willing to seriously take this action. Hamilton acknowledged this is “a real conundrum” but argued that “everyone should be doing this.”
Hamilton was then asked what states who use this law can do if the DHS chooses to “slow-roll” with their requests, with Kelly suggesting that DHS could hypothetically provide the information requested from states after the election. To remedy this, Hamilton said states can give DHS “hard and fast deadlines” and threaten to sue if this information is not provided in a timely manner. --->READ MORE HEREFollow link below to a relevant story:
+++++U.S. Supreme Court gives Republicans partial victory+++++
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