Not registered to vote? Get ready. Total strangers may ask you why.
New Mexicans get ready for an onslaught of voter registration and education organizations to set up shop, surround the grocery store parking lots with clip boards and pens ready to sign you up if you have not registered to vote yet.
One, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), is preparing for what it calls a "massive community mobilization" effort in New Mexico and across many western states to get Latinos and others registered to vote.
It's part of a campaign to get 12 million Latino voters registered and 10 million of them to the voting booths in November that was kicked off in Los Angeles over the weekend at the 3rd annual National Latino Congreso. It attracted community and elected officials from 36 states and 13 countries.
But the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project won't be the only ones gearing up before November's election, said University of New Mexico political science professor Christine Sierra. Expect ACORN, Move-on.org and others to get more active soon.
"It will be a repeat of 2004's voter mobilization efforts," said Sierra, who along with fellow political science professor and political expert Chris Garcia co-authored two reports looking at the Hispanic vote in New Mexico during the 2000 and 2004 elections.
"You'll see 527s, special interest groups and advocacy groups doing what I call parachuting into town," Sierra said. "It was great activity, but in the end, if you look at the outcome, it was the Republicans who stayed under the radar and helped Bush win the election."
When theDemocrat-friendly groups land this time, however, they will have to take a page from the Republican voter mobilization playbook. Because despite the large-scale efforts of Democrat-heavy groups such as ACORN, Move-on.org and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project it wasn't enough to swing things in the Democrats' favor.
"We saw a big push from the Kerry-Edwards camp in 2004," Sierra said. "The Obama camp will have some of these same groups in its corner in the coming months, but they'll want to do things differently if they expect a different outcome. Will they? That's a question to ask of Democratic Party officials."
Sierra said perhaps Democrats might want to take a page out of the Republican play book when it comes to the way The GOP targets voters. She said the Republicans used local grassroots networks, matching up veterans groups with veterans, church members with church members, evangelicals to evangelicals.
"They used their local institution-based networks," Sierra said. "Perhaps a mix of organized advocacy groups working the parking lots, as well as more personalized door-to-door voter education is necessary."
Because these big groups are leadership driven from outside New Mexico, Sierra thinks local groups also must get busy with their own brand of voter education.
"The Democrats are not going to turn away the organizing resources of these groups," she said. "But the one-on-one outreach that local groups such as Southwest Organizing Project and others can provide is far superior than having a bunch of strangers walking precincts and leaving literature at the door."
The message from Sierra is that the power of talking to your neighbors, friends and family should not be underestimated.
"One problem with the big groups, such as ACORN, is that they hire people," Sierra said. "And sometimes what they get are people who are really not participants in the electoral process. They are hired hands, and they are not going to be as successful as getting people who are passionate about their politics to spread the word."
New Mexico's Jaime Chavez works for the Southwest voter registration education project and was one of the participants at this past weekend's Congreso. He said his group is ramping up its New Mexico operations. Besides looking for volunteers and others to work to get out the vote, it hopes to educate and register new voters.
"A successful mobilization will send a powerful message in favor of justice for immigrants, federal action to reactivate the economy, fixing our broken educational system, extending health care to all, and ending the war in Iraq," said Chavez, who helped to launch the "Movimiento 10-12" campaign. "Those are the top five Latino issues we see."
SVREP has targeted 10 New Mexico counties in which the group will provide training, financing, data, media support, materials, and other technical support to community-based coalitions that pledge to mobilize their memberships and volunteers to do neighborhood-based voter registration (and turnout) during August-November. SVREP will invest $3 million towards its portion of the goals (registering and turning out 150,000 voters).
The New Mexico counties receiving SVREP help are Bernalillo, Dona Ana, Santa Fe, Taos , McKinley , Rio Arriba, Valencia Chaves, Sandoval, Eddy and Grant.
SVREP also has joined together with LULAC, Hispanic Federation, and other national Hispanic-serving organizations as well as hundreds of local organizations and elected officials to launch a coordinated national nonpartisan campaign in more than 20 states to register and get 250,000 new voters during this summer and fall.
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