Will 300,000 fewer new citizens be eligible to vote in November because of the pandemic?
Friday, September 4, 2020
By Allegra Taylor
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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.
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