SANTA ANA, California — This city of nearly 310,000 people isn’t well known as a liberal hotbed like a pair of major Golden State cities about a seven-hour drive north, San Francisco and Oakland. That may change after Election Day.

Santa Ana, Orange County’s second-most populous city after Disneyland-based Anaheim, is set to host a Nov. 5 ballot measure on whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote in municipal elections. It’s no academic matter in a city where an estimated quarter of the local population are noncitizens. Santa Ana is four-fifths Hispanic or Latino and was characterized in a 2016 New York Times story as the “face of a new California, a state where Latinos have more influence in everyday life — electorally, culturally and demographically — than almost anywhere else in the country.”