Latino grassroots organizers are having trouble registering the minority voters they had hoped would flood in after recent pro-immigration rallies.
And while it is still early, groups expecting a surge of new voters to beef up Latino political muscle said they are seeing only a trickle.
“We hoped for more,” said Rachel Olivarez-Sellers, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Latino Initiative. “I don’t foresee (registering thousands of new voters) anytime soon. It’s hard to get the Latinos to register to vote.”
Lydia Camarillo, vice president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, still expects more than 50,000 new Latino voters in Colorado. She says they just won’t come from the marches and rallies where many of the participants are either already registered, are not citizens or are not old enough to vote.
“In reference to the marches and the people who walked out, they were underage, immigrants holding Green Cards and clearly undocumented workers,” she said.
With so many groups doing uncoordinated voter registration efforts in various counties, good numbers do not exist on how many new voters were registered in the past month or two.
Camarillo said there were 184,000 registered Latino voters in Colorado during the 2002 congressional election and 118,000 of them cast ballots. This year, she projects 241,000 registered Latino voters in the state, with 146,000 casting ballots.
Many of the groups, like the Democratic Party’s initiative, won’t go into full swing until mid- or late summer.
Dusti Gurule, of the nonpartisan Latina Initiative, is working on both registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. The group expects to register only 1,000 new voters, but it plans to contact as many as 40,000 sporadic Latino voters in Denver, Boulder and Adams counties to try to get them to polls.
“There are a large number of ineligible voters who can’t vote because they are not citizens or because of their age,” she said. “We’re going to get involved in other ways and shift our focus to the eligible voters.”
Bill Vandenberg, of the Colorado Progressive Coalition, said the group, which two years ago registered thousands of voters, is not doing a registration drive this year because of a 2005 state law that makes it more difficult for groups to do large-scale voter registrations.
“We’ve decided to use our limited resources to minimize the drop-off in voter turnout,” he said, adding the coalition will provide rides to the polls and voter contact.
Other groups plan to host voter registration days for high school seniors, contact immigrants who have just attained citizenship and go door-to-door in neighborhoods that have a lot of residents with Latino surnames, because voter rolls do not record ethnicity.
Camarillo is optimistic that Hispanics will be an increasing political force in this and future elections and expects further rallies on immigration reform later this month to energize voters.
“Voting is our ticket for respect and dignity,” she said.
Staff writer Arthur Kane can be reached at 303-820-1626 or at akane@denverpost.com.
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