Latino groups unite to launch $5-million voter registration drive
Buoyed by a surge of political interest among immigrants and youth, nine national Latino organizations Friday announced a joint effort to register as many as 2 million new voters as presidential candidates from both parties vie for their community's increasingly influential support.
The $5-million nonpartisan voter registration effort, announced at a national Latino forum in downtown Los Angeles, comes amid an unprecedented campaign by community organizations and Spanish-language media to boost Latino civic participation -- and two new reports showing signs of success.
The U.S. government last week reported that the number of Mexican immigrants who became citizens last year swelled by 50%, with hundreds of thousands more in line to process their naturalization applications.
Community leaders Friday expressed even more excitement about a new study by the Texas-based William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonpartisan public policy and research organization that found more than 1 million Latinos had registered to vote during this primary season, including 500,000 in California and Texas.
The biggest buzz centered around who most of the new voters are: not new U.S. citizens as expected, but American-born youth under age 30. That demographic is notoriously difficult to reach but makes up three-fourths of the Latino community's 8 million eligible but unregistered voters, according to Antonio Gonzalez of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles.
"I was shocked by the increase in young new voters," Gonzalez said. "They're typically the hardest to reach."
Gonzalez said he had expected that newly naturalized, older Latinos would make up the bulk of new voters. But government delays in processing more than 1 million pending naturalization applications had jeopardized the chances of significantly boosting those numbers. Although U.S. officials told immigrant rights groups earlier this year that they aimed to process three-fourths of the pending applications by September, the New York-based Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund has filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government to expedite the process.
The new voter mobilization campaign would largely target younger voters through 125 organizing committees in 12 states, including California, Gonzalez said.
