Director:
Michele Wucker, WPI Senior Fellow & Ron Hayduk, CUNY/Borough of Manhattan College Assistant Professor

The Immigrant Voting Project (www.immigrantvoting.org) is a resource network that promotes research and discussion about reinstating voting rights in local elections for all community residents, regardless of their citizenship. Immigrant suffrage, also known as resident voting, is an innovative policy to promote civic participation and responsibility among incipient Americans and to better educate and prepare them for eventual citizenship; to restore a voice to one of the last disenfranchised segments of the population; and to increase government accountability in communities with large immigrant populations. Resident voting was allowed in the United States for the first 150 years of our history. It reappeared since the 1960s and now is practiced in more than 20 countries around the world, and has been revived in the United States over the last decade. The Immigrant Voting Project collaborates with the New York Coalition to Expand Voting Rights and with immigrant voting initiatives around the United States, including those in Maryland, Washington DC, Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut. The Immigrant Voting Project's work feeds into WPI's Program on Citizenship and Security.