Registered by Neighbors

By Jon Wiener, The Nation. Posted October 12, 2004.

Editor's Note: Jon Wiener is on the board of the Liberty Hill Foundation.

This time will be different – this time we are in it for the long haul." That's what voter registration and turn-out-the-vote projects say every four years, when they go to work trying to do something about the fact that 100 million Americans – most of them poor and working class – don't vote. This year more work and more money are going into voter registration and turnout than ever before. More than a thousand projects are under way nationwide. Among the most promising: Liberty Vote in Los Angeles, which really is different and really might change things for the long haul.

The problem in low-income, low-turnout communities is that poor people understandably view politics with cynicism and distrust. Research shows that direct mail and phone calls don't work. Voter registration tables outside the mall or volunteers standing on corners with clipboards don't do very well either. The Liberty Vote strategy is different: not just voter registration and get out the vote on Election Day but "voter engagement," which seeks a culture change. The best way to get nonvoters to vote, in this view, is for a member of their own community to knock on their door. Liberty Vote is working with community organizations in poor neighborhoods that until now have not been engaged in electoral work.

In Los Angeles, neighborhood organizations involved in Liberty Vote are now making voter work another tool in community organizing, another way to recruit and train volunteers. The Union de Vecinos is typical – a group with several neighborhood committees working on local environmental justice issues in East LA. Kafi Watlington-MacLeod, a Liberty Vote consultant, explains, "They will be going door to door, speaking Spanish, hoping to sign up 2,000 new voters in Boyle Heights. Their new plan is that, in nonelection years, their neighborhood committees will work on local toxic issues; in election years, those committees will turn into precinct teams." Another Liberty Vote group, the LA Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, is working on registering very low income and homeless people. It conducted focus groups of homeless people last spring to help come up with a strategy. Nancy Berlin, coordinator of the Welfare Reform Advocacy Project, explained, "The focus group in South LA, which was mostly people 18 to 35, was angry – they said nothing ever changes, the problems are too big, 'our votes don't count.' But they also had procedural problems – they had no idea about how to register or where to vote. We found that if we talked about issues, like the upcoming ballot initiative amending the three strikes law, people got interested and wanted to register and vote."

Peer training is a key component of Liberty Vote. Four big community organizations with some political experience are taking the lead in training six smaller neighborhood groups. Each Liberty Vote group will focus on a different low-income, low-turnout area. Each group has set a numerical target for new voter turnout, and the project will report on which organizations and which approaches succeeded – and which didn't.

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