Like many families across California, community building, exercising our right to vote, and fighting for our freedoms were cornerstones of my upbringing. We Californians are not only proud to live in a culturally rich state with exceptional weather, but we are also proud of our heritage of civic engagement and public discourse.
What makes us true Californians is that we lead the nation in the fight for racial justice, such as ending discrimination at the ballot box.
From a young age, I was instilled in the importance of community building and community organizing by my mother and aunt, both of whom moved to the United States to seek economic freedom and leave unhealthy relationships behind.
In Mexico, my mother struggled to make ends meet and became involved in grassroots campaigns to strengthen the economic strength of working-class communities. After we moved to San Diego, she continued the fight for better wages and working conditions while working as a janitor.
Guided by the brave and caring leadership of my mother and aunt, I continue to fight for a more equitable future for all. Through my work as an advocate for opportunity for working-class communities, I learned that more than 4.6 million eligible voters in California are still unregistered voters. These are disproportionately Black, Latino, and Asian American workers.
California has made significant progress in protecting voter rights over the past few decades, but it has not always been this way. In fact, the practice of voter exclusion has existed in California since According to a report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy, California became a state. California made it harder for voters to participate in voting by denying citizenship to Chinese immigrants, requiring all voters to take reading tests at the ballot box, and enacting a series of poll taxes that disproportionately burdened workers, immigrants, and casual voters.
These hurdles persist today because many working-class people of color cannot afford to take time off from work or their daily obligations to register to vote.
Despite attempts to improve voter access, the burden of registration still falls on the individual, and we need more action from our lawmakers to end decades of disenfranchisement. That’s why a broad coalition of 150 grassroots and statewide organizations is supporting Senate Bill 299, which would authorize the Secretary of State to add millions of voters from communities like mine to the voter rolls.
Similar laws have been passed in Alaska, Colorado, DC, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. Voter registration and turnout have increased significantly in these states.
Authored by Senators Monique Limón and Caroline Menjivar, SB 299 would be a major step toward removing barriers to voting for working-class single mothers, fathers with multiple jobs, and young workers in the gig economy. The bill would allow the DMV to share a list of “pre-approved” voters (even if a person does not explicitly register to vote with the DMV) with the Secretary of State, who could in turn register millions of eligible Californians.
State lawmakers must now act quickly and pass SB 299 to meet the legislative deadline before the bill lands on the governor’s desk.
The voter registration system proposed by SB 299 has proven to be efficient at registering eligible voters, keeping records accurate, and ensuring that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote. In fact, SB 299 would strengthen important protections for noncitizens who mistakenly register to vote.
Although such incidents do occur on rare occasions, the state’s current system puts noncitizens at risk of significant legal consequences by failing to filter ineligible voters from the voter rolls. SB 299 would fix that problem. Simply put, none of the states that have this voter registration system have ever reported any erroneous registrations of ineligible voters.
I am proud to carry on the legacy of the strong women in my family and the generations of women of color who have fought to ensure that all eligible voters can exercise that right. I look forward to voting once I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. When the time comes for me to register to vote, I hope our system will be updated to be more inclusive, efficient, and secure, as proposed in SB 299.
Itzel Maganda Chavez works as a civic engagement director at Alliance San Diego and lives in Golden Hill.
