Coalition Plans to Register 500,000 Recent Immigrants to Vote

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on July 10, 2008, Printed on May 26, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/91134/coalition_plans_to_register_500%2C000_recent_immigrants_to_vote

Washington, DC -- A national coalition of immigrant rights groups, ethnic organizations, and community and leadership organizations Thursday announced a plan to register half-a-million new voters from the ranks of recent immigrants for the 2008 election.

The We Are America Alliance will work in 13 states to register voters and conduct get-out-the-vote efforts on Election Day, participants said. The effort is targeting people age 25 and under, new citizens and eligible but infrequent voters. These voters historically have been overlooked by campaigns and susceptible to being disenfranchised.

The We Are America Alliance partner organizations have fought for the rights of immigrants in their respective communities, but this year they are coming together to make voter engagement their number one priority, said Holli Holiday, WAAA Executive Director.

"We will be touching over 1 million immigrant voters going into the fall election and encouraging them to vote come November," said Erica Bernal, senior director of civic engagement for the national Association of Latino Elected Officials Education Fund. "We will spend over $10 million turning out the immigrant vote. This is unprecedented."

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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