Organizers aim to get marchers onto voter rolls

People who participate in the march for immigrant rights today will see as many as 100 voter registration volunteers working the crowd downtown, along with voter registration tables at the start and end points.

“What we are saying is 'march today, vote tomorrow,' ” said Jessica Nolan, a spokeswoman for the march's organizers, which include community, labor and religious groups.

After a month of similar marches nationwide that have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants, the organizers of the San Diego march are seeing what some political observers see: the potential to harness the energy present in those protests and convert it into Latino voting power.

“I think it is very clear that it has the potential for mobilizing both nonregistered U.S. citizen Latinos as well as pushing Latinos to naturalize,” said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization in Los Angeles that focuses on Latino issues.

If this momentum can be captured, political observers say, it could boost Latino voter participation.

A postelection study in November 2004 showed that about 1.6 million more Latinos voted in that national election than in 2000. But their participation still lagged behind that of white or black Americans, according to a report released last year by the Pew Hispanic Center. Forty-seven percent of Latinos who were of voting age and U.S. citizens went to the polls, compared with 67 percent of whites and 60 percent of blacks eligible to vote.

There are a number of reasons for this, including low voter registration rates. To begin with, there are fewer Latinos who are eligible to vote than noneligible ones. According to the Pew report, out of roughly 41 million Latinos living in the United States in 2004, only 16.1 million were eligible to vote because the rest were either noncitizens or were under 18 at the time.

But even out of the 16.1 million who were eligible, only 9.3 million were registered. And of those, only 7.6 million actually cast ballots. This means that the majority of Latinos who could have voted in 2004, 8.5 million people, didn't.

Political experts point to several factors for this lack of participation. Immigrants from countries with unstable political systems, as many are in Latin America, tend mistrust government in general. And, as also is the case with many native-born Americans of lower socioeconomic status, basic survival often takes precedence over politics.

“Politics, for most Americans, is not an everyday-life issue,” Pachon said. “It is not something that affects you personally. That is why these demonstrations are so interesting, because what it shows is that immigration is not an academic issue; it is a genuine issue on the Hispanic immigrant side. You are talking about your friends, relatives, neighbors.”

In the wake of the mid-1990s furor over illegal immigration that swept California, record numbers of Latinos became voters. On the table in 1994 was Proposition 187, a state measure that threatened to cut off undocumented immigrants from public education, health care and other social services.


