While numerous US states are doing everything they can to make voting more difficult and shrink the number of people taking part in elections, New York City has gone the opposite direction and opened the polls to noncitizen legal immigrants.
The suffrage is only for local elections, and only for legal permanent residents like green card holders and those protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
But it will instantly up the number of eligible voters in the city by nearly 800,000, according to the estimate CNN's Kelly Mena cited in her report. In a cosmopolitan city of immigrants, those 800,000 people come from all over. The Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, Jamaica and Guyana are the most well-represented countries of birth for immigrants, according to city government data.
