Non-citizen suffrage in the United States
Voting rights of foreigners in the United States / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Non-citizen suffrage in the United States has been greatly reduced over time and historically has been a contentious issue.[1][2]
Before 1926, as many as 40 states allowed non-citizens to vote in elections.[3] While federal law does not prohibit noncitizens from voting in state or local elections, no state has allowed noncitizens to vote in statewide elections since Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926.[4]
Since 1997, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 has prohibited non-citizens from voting in federal elections, with the threat of fines, imprisonment, inadmissibility and deportation.[5][6][7] Exempt from punishment is any noncitizen who, at the time of voting, had two natural or adoptive U.S. citizen parents, who began permanently living in the United States before turning 16 years old, and who reasonably believed that they were a citizen of the United States.[5]
As of December 2022, non-citizen voting is allowed for a handful of local elections, including in Winooski and Montpelier in Vermont, and in eleven cities in Maryland near Washington, D.C.[9] In 2023, D.C. itself started allowing local non-citizen voting. Additionally, the U.S. territories of American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands allow non-citizen US nationals to vote, a status granted to all persons born in American Samoa.[10][11] All persons born in the Northern Mariana Islands automatically become US citizens at birth, as opposed to becoming US nationals at birth. Guam and Hawaiʻi, by contrast, do not allow non-citizen US nationals to vote. Turnout by non-citizens in many of these cities remains very low (sometimes less than 0.5% of voters), with some non-citizens expressing fear about the spotlight and backlash around how voting might hurt their application to become citizens.[12]