Will 300,000 fewer new citizens be eligible to vote in November because of the pandemic?
By Allegra Taylor
Copy link
Copy featured image
YES
The mid-March shutdown of in-person interviews and other services by U.S. immigration authorities means up to 315,000 citizenship applicants are unlikely to be processed in time to register to vote in the November election.
An immigration-services company, Boundless, bases the estimate on the size of the backlog and a slower than usual pace of scheduling in the weeks after the immigration agency reopened on June 4. Before the pandemic, immigration advocacy groups had estimated that the routine flow of processing naturalization applications—almost a 9-month process in normal times—would add up to 860,000 newly eligible voters this year.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
