Project Aimed At Registering Hispanic Voters State Commission Recruiting Leaders For Drive, Which Will Start In Spokane This Spring

Compliments of Washington’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs, Spokane County will be one of the first counties in the state to get a crash course in Spanish - along with a grass-roots, bilingual voter registration drive.

With the slogan “Su voto es su voz” (“Your vote is your voice”) the commission created the Voter Education and Registration Project last year as the first non-partisan, statewide voter registration and education effort aimed at Hispanics.

The commission is recruiting leaders for a volunteer-sponsored campaign in Spokane, Yakima and throughout Eastern Washington.

The drive is a two-pronged effort aimed at increasing voter participation of Hispanic citizens and encouraging legal aliens to become U.S. citizens.

The group hopes to start knocking on doors and distributing literature in Spokane this spring.

“It was a strategic decision to begin the drive in Eastern Washington as a way of showing respect to the Hispanic people who concentrate there: They’re not a secondary thought to the people in Seattle or Olympia,” said Jaime Gallardo, commission staff member.

In some cities in Eastern Washington, Hispanic residents constitute as much as 47 percent of the population. Spokane County has the eighth largest concentration of Hispanics in the state with more than 7,000 residents of Latin descent, according to the Census Bureau.

Although increasing voter turnout and encouraging naturalization are the primary goals, the commission also aims to teach Latino voters about the democratic process, Gallardo said.

Eventually, campaign workers and their contacts in the Hispanic community will form a “political infrastructure” in which voting, running for office and getting elected are commonplace.

“We’ve been too caught up in the ‘showing people we’re organized.’ With this, we’re going to show that we’re not only organized, but we’re going to deliver. It looks like a simple voter registration, but it will further involvement in the political process,” Gallardo said.

The Hispanic population in Washington faces unique barriers to registration. That’s why the commission is the only state agency to launch a voter registration drive along ethnic lines, Gallardo said.

“There are different phenomena at work in the Hispanic community. We have issues of citizenship and the youthfulness of population that other groups do not have,” Gallardo said.

More than 70 percent of the state’s Hispanic population is under 24 years old - a demographic group that is the least likely to vote across all racial and ethnic lines.

Citizenship - the mere ability to vote - is the other issue.

Many Hispanics are legal workers who have opted against citizenship for reasons of ethnic pride or fear of the naturalization process.

As a result of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, 37,000 immigrants to Washington, mostly from Mexico, were given U.S. residency but not the voting rights they would have had with citizenship.

The voter registration project hopes to entice these legal aliens to become citizens through an application at the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“You might be a legal resident and you’re happy with that, but you’re still not talking that final piece of the pie. Someone else might take that piece and vote for policy that goes against what you want,” said Gonzaga University senior Lorenzo Rios.

Rios has been working with Catholic youth groups in Yakima and Wapato to find campaign leaders. He’s also trying to penetrate the Spokane Hispanic community through Hispanic community associations, colleges, schools and St. Joseph’s Church, 1503 W. Dean.

The commission, which is looking for bilingual volunteers, hopes to distribute voter registration information in Spanish and English.

For more information, call Jaime Gallardo at (360) 753-3159. Or write to the Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs, P.O. Box 40924, Olympia, Wash. 98504-0924.