After 2 Years of Waiting, Noncitizen Parents Still Can’t Vote in Oakland School Board Elections

This story was produced by El Tímpano, a bilingual nonprofit news outlet that amplifies the voices of Latino and Mayan immigrants in Oakland and the wider Bay Area. The original version of the story can be found here.

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oncitizen parents and guardians with students enrolled in Oakland Unified School District won the right to vote in school board elections two years ago. But they won’t be casting their ballots anytime soon.

Oakland ballot Measure S, passed in 2022, allows noncitizen parents, including those lacking permanent legal status, green card holders and asylum seekers, to vote in school board elections. But the city has yet to begin creating a process for people to register and cast ballots as noncitizens, El Tímpano found.

The delay has disappointed immigrant parents like Maria Cordova, a 47-year-old immigrant from El Salvador. Her 12-year-old daughter is in fifth grade at Fruitvale Elementary, and she said she was looking forward to voting. “I want to be able to vote because we can decide who can offer better opportunities for the children,” Cordova said. “So that we all, as parents and our children, have the opportunity to have a better life.”

A coalition of groups that support immigrants and their families in Oakland also supported Measure S, including The Unity Council and Homies Empowerment.

The failure of an appeals court case challenging a similar ordinance in San Francisco cleared the way for Measure S to move forward without facing potential legal complications in late 2023.

Oakland City Council supported the resolution from councilmembers Treva Reid and Dan Kalb to include Measure S on the 2022 general election ballot. The measure allowed the city to amend the Oakland city charter and permit undocumented residents who are the parents, legal guardians or legally recognized caregivers of a child residing in Oakland to vote in elections for Oakland Unified School District. Most Oaklanders — 66% of voters — approved the measure.

“The hope is that parents of school-aged children should be able to decide who runs the [Oakland] school system,” Councilmember Kalb told El Tímpano. “Those parents, whether they’re citizens or not, shouldn’t be a factor [in voting], and so we want that to be a reality.”

Noncitizens make up 14% of Oakland’s population, and there are more than 13,000 noncitizen parents who send their children to school in Oakland, the resolution noted. Including immigrant parents in conversations about curriculum, staff and language used in class could lead to better academic outcomes for students, it stated.

Kalb attributed the delay in implementing Measure S to another measure passed in 2020, Measure QQ, allowing 16 and 17-year-old students in Oakland Unified School District to vote in school board elections. That process has now been created, and 16 and 17-year-old students can vote in the upcoming elections for the first time.

According to Kalb, the Oakland city clerk recommended pausing Measure S until after the 2024 election, as they were still managing the complexities of rolling out the youth vote.

Currently, Measure S has no timeline for implementation.

Kalb said he intends to meet with the city clerk after the November elections to set in motion the process of allowing noncitizen parents to vote. “The hope is that the council will pass an ordinance sometime in the next few months or next six months,” he said.

Oakland’s city clerk referred El Tímpano’s questions about implementing Measure S to an Oakland public information officer, who did not comment on the record for this story.

Creating a new category of voters

San Francisco and other cities have already made noncitizen voting a reality. In 2016, San Francisco voters approved Proposition N, which extended voting rights to noncitizens at the school board level. The law took effect in 2018.

School board members have several key responsibilities that directly affect the district’s quality of education and student experience. They include overseeing the district’s budget, developing and approving policies, negotiating teacher and staff contracts and other key decisions that shape the educational landscape.

Parents who voted in San Francisco’s school board election said the experience motivated them to become more involved with their children’s school, according to a report by Chinese for Affirmative Action, which supported giving noncitizens the right to vote in school board elections. One parent said they were inspired to volunteer and assume leadership positions in school committees and councils after voting for the first time in a school board election.

Protecting noncitizen voters

Voting rights for noncitizens come as part of a long push-back against anti-immigrant sentiment. Proposition 187, passed in 1993, mobilized immigrant organizations to create and back measures that expanded rights and access to services, said Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University and co-author of the study “Immigrant Voting and the Movement for Inclusion in San Francisco.”

“California went from being worse on immigrant rights to first on immigrant rights in a lot of ways,” he added.

Figuring out how to better protect immigrants can make a difference in how or if they want to participate in local elections. The number of noncitizen voters in San Francisco has fluctuated between small and nearly nonexistent: 59 parents voted in the 2018 election, but only two noncitizens voted in 2019. The low turnout was attributed mainly to fear, though language barriers and a need for better voter mobilization likely also contributed to the low initial turnout, according to the report from Chinese for Affirmative Action.

More than 300 noncitizen parents voted in a 2022 recall election, but no noncitizen parents voted in 2023 because of a pending court challenge to the law’s constitutionality. Because the law has now been ruled constitutional, noncitizen parents can resume voting, starting with the 2024 school board election.

Noncitizen voting has become a flashpoint amid unfounded accusations that people lacking permanent legal status have been voting in federal and state elections. Multiple news outlets have noted that former president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has spread misinformation about noncitizen voting to set the stage for challenging the legitimacy of the presidential election if Trump loses.

People lacking permanent legal status may be reluctant to call attention to their status by registering to vote as noncitizens in local elections, Hayduk said.

“Some folks have looked into whether or not people’s names could be protected like victims of domestic violence or police officers — they can register to vote, but their names don’t appear on a public voter registration list,” he said. “So, why not for immigrants? But that change needs to happen at the state level.”

Yet, despite the fear, there are parents who still want to vote in Oakland’s school board elections and are disappointed that they cannot vote in 2024.

“It frustrates me,” OUSD parent Cordova said. “It feels like we are not taken into account just because we are immigrants.”