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New Movement Advocates Pasadena School Board Election Voting Rights for Undocumented Immigrants

PEPPEG presentation seeks to create new voters in school board elections

Published on Friday, November 25, 2016 | 6:19 am
 
Ron Hayduck, San Francisco State University Associate Professor, talks voting rights.

A small group of Pasadenans may be leading a quiet revolution in voting over the next few years.

Pasadenans Empowering Parental Participation in Educational Governance (PEPPEG), backed by an expert in the field of voters’ rights, presented their idea of allowing the undocumented to vote in school board elections, at the Pasadena Library Tuesday evening to an enthusiastic group of listeners.

The group, co-chaired by Joanna Amador, Julieta Aragon, and Dr. Victor Gonzales, is proposing that a measure be placed on the November, 2020 general election ballot to change the City of Pasadena Charter to provide for all parents, guardians or custodians of Pasadena Unified students, regardless of immigration or other status, to have voting rights in District Board of Education elections.

According to a PEPPEG representative, Pat Cahalan, Scott Phelps, Adrienne Mullen and Larry Torres — who together represent a majority of Pasadena Unified School Board members — have each enthusiastically endorsed such a charter change for the District.

San Francisco State University (SFSU)Associate Professor of Political Science Ron Hayduk, who is a nationally recognized expert on immigrant voting rights and the author of “Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting in the U.S., ” is all for the idea, and assured the audience that such a move is not without precedent in the US. Hayduk has conducted and published research about the impact of voting laws and procedures on voter participation, as well as election rules and administration.

According to Hayduck, the idea is perfectly legal. It’s actually a “global trend,” he said, with more than 45 countries in the world allowing it.

From 1776 to 1926, in fact, US immigrants voted in local, state and federal elections, and immigrants could also run an hold office in some towns and cities in the US.

It’s a phenomenon “as American as apple pie and older than our national pastime of baseball,” said Hayduck.

And Hayduck also sees parallels between the ultimate denial of voting rights to undocumented immigrants in 1926, to the anti-immigrant conversations heard today.

“Voting is about who has a say, and who is included and who is excluded,” Hayduck said in his presentation.

“Women and Blacks were denied the vote based on sexism and racism, not citizenship,” he said.

Eventually, said Hayduck, internal conflict and wars, like the French Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War made Americans more and more leery of “non-Christian” immigrants. According to Hayduck, Americans feared newcomers would not assimilate, and might eventually dilute U.S. culture and identity.

The onset of war in Europe and the eruption of World War 1 helped solidify those fears, he said.

When Immigrant voting was finally eliminated state by state, in 1926, the effect was dramatic, said Hayduck. Millions of former voters were disenfranchised, and voter turnout declined from an impressive 80% in 1896 to 49% in 1924.

Hayduck was reluctant to come out and say that “the time was now,” for Pasadena, owing to the new political climate in much of the nation, but did say that any effort to make the new law a reality and change the City’s charter to allow such a vote “could take time.”

Citizens in San Francisco rejected a similar measure twice before passing it, said Hayduck, and the measure narrowly lost in Boston, Vermont and Washington, D.C.

In Tacoma Park, Maryland, however, where undocumented immigrant voting was allowed, the immigrant turnout was equal to citizens, though it eventually declined slightly over time.

Hayduck also noted that oftentimes, immigrant voter measure campaigns are led by undocumented immigrants themselves diluting the argument that undocumented voters might be less informed than citizens themselves.

But ultimately, Hayduck sees more unrestricted voting as the way of the future, saying, “Maybe voting rights should cross borders and follow people, like goods and services.”

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