Refugee Organizing Helps Spur Noncitizen Voting in Vermont Cities

Non-citizen residents of Takoma Park, Maryland have been able to vote in municipal elections since 1993, and 16- and 17-year-olds there have had access to the ballot since 2013. Residents of the city, where roughly 30% of the population was born outside of the United States, say participating in city elections makes them feel more welcome in the community and helps them get invested in local issues.

For its mayoral elections, Minneapolis uses ranked-choice voting, a process that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing just one. The system, along with the state's culture of civic engagement and its ease of voting, is believed to have contributed to record-high turnout during the 2021 election, when more than half of registered voters in the city cast a ballot.

Ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to pick multiple candidates for their vote to be transferred to if their first choice fails to advance, has now been approved in at least 60 jurisdictions, including Alaska, where it helped Democrat Mary Peltola defeat Republican Sarah Palin.

Ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank their preference of candidates rather than choosing just one, was rolled out in Alaska this year, and exit polling showed that roughly 85 percent of voters found the system "simple" to use. The voting method has now been adopted in 62 jurisdictions across the U.S.

To boost turnout in local elections that often see low participation, cities such as Berkeley, Calif. and Ann Arbor, Mich. have shifted their election cycles to match up with higher-profile presidential contests. Researchers found that moving municipal elections to sync up with presidential elections boosts turnout by an average of 29 percent, and at least 11 communities approved similar measures this year to make the switch to even-year elections.

Alaska recently held its first high-profile election using ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to select a second- and third-choice candidate to transfer their vote to if their first-choice candidate doesn't get enough votes to advance. Democrat Mary Peltola was elected in an upset over Republican Sarah Palin after receiving a higher percentage of second-choice votes transferred from the third candidate in the race, and this fall, a number of other states, including Nevada, will consider whether to implement ranked-choice voting.

States such as Washington and California have nonpartisan "top-two" primaries, in which the top two vote getters move on to the general election regardless of their party affiliation. In Washington, voter turnout in primary elections has jumped from 18 percent in 2003, before the law went into effect, to nearly 55 percent in 2020.

One way that any ordinary citizen can lend a hand to the plight of those caught in the American immigration system is by being a court observer: someone who sits in immigration court and takes notes by hand. Several organizations are working to develop a standardized way of evaluating judges' treatment of migrants to put it in a central database so that the data can be used to evaluate the human impact by the system as a whole. People who participate testify to the job alleviating despair over the situation as they can mitigate any unfair practices going unnoticed.

Non-profits in California worked together to set up a national network for undocumented immigrants to fight isolation and support legal aid. Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) offers a free confidential hotline to report human rights abuses at detention centers and help families locate each other. CIVIC’s volunteers receive 14,000 calls a month from 210 detention centers in the United States.

After using the federal SAVE tool to check its voter rolls for deceased voters and noncitizens, one Arizona county was able to expand ballot access for 255 people who previously did not have proof of citizenship allowing them to vote in both federal and state races. However, the tool has been shown to falsely identify some voters as noncitizens, raising concerns among voting rights advocates.