Voters in Orange County, California’s second largest city decidedly rejected the latest effort to authorize noncitizen voting in local elections.

It comes as voters in eight other states on Tuesday approved Republican-backed constitutional amendments strengthening their existing prohibitions on noncitizen voting.

In Santa Ana, California, 62.25 percent of voters opposed Measure DD, which would have allowed noncitizens and undocumented immigrants to vote in municipal elections. Only 37.75 percent of voters supported the measure, election results show.

Santa Ana, a city of more than 300,000 people, is the Orange County seat. Its city council added Measure DD to the ballot by a 4-3 vote last fall.

Supporters of the measure argued that about a quarter of Santa Ana residents can’t participate in city elections because they aren’t citizens and allowing them to vote would make “city-wide elections fair and inclusive.”

“Santa Ana will be a stronger city when all residents can participate in making decisions that affect their daily lives, including decisions about who gets to represent them at City Hall,” supporters wrote in an official argument in favor of Measure DD.

But opponents of the measure said allowing noncitizens to vote devalues citizenship. They also argued that if it passed, the measure would have required the city to take over its elections from the Orange County registrar, and the city has no experience running elections. Taking over the administration of the city’s elections would also cost millions of dollars that could be better spent on other priorities, they argued.

Opponents of the measure, including James Lacy, a longtime conservative activist and lawyer, and the Santa Ana Citizens for Voting campaign, focused much of their attention on the city’s many naturalized citizens who came to the country legally and earned the right to vote after pledging allegiance to the United States.

Lacy, whose mother was born in Russia and escaped communism, said the right to vote is “precious” and “the crown jewel” of citizenship. He believes that emphasizing that message to naturalized citizens is the key to defeating similar noncitizen-voting measures if and when they arise in other parts of California in the future.

“Naturalized citizens work hard, and must take a test, and pledge their allegiance to our nation to gain this important right [to vote],” he said in an email. “They are not about to devalue their achievements.”

In addition to the rejection of Measure DD in Santa Ana, clear majorities of voters in Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin approved GOP-backed constitutional amendments to clarify that noncitizens and illegal immigrants can’t vote in those states. Several of the measures modified language in their state constitutions to say that “only” citizens can vote rather than “all citizens” or “every citizen,” according to NBC News.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections. Republicans said the measures were proactive efforts to prevent future problems with noncitizen-voting.

While noncitizens are barred from voting in federal and state elections, a handful of towns and cities have authorized noncitizens and undocumented immigrants to vote in some local elections.

In California, San Francisco and Oakland have authorized noncitizen voting in school-board elections, though Oakland leaders haven’t yet created a process for it to take effect. Nationally, Washington D.C. and several cities in Vermont and Maryland also allow noncitizens to vote in some municipal elections.