Guest Blogger: Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund
This November, the Latino community has a historic opportunity to play a decisive role in the outcome of the presidential election. In order to meet the needs of the country’s Latino voters, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund has launched an unprecedented voter engagement campaign that is changing the face of the American Electorate by increasing Latino voter participation.
The Fund’s Voces del Pueblo voter engagement program has contacted nearly one million Latino voters since its inception in 2001, assisted thousands of voters nationwide, and has built local capacity for GOTV work among community based organizations. The NALEO Educational Fund believes that lower voter participation among Latinos is not the result of apathy, but lack of meaningful engagement. Our program seeks to reach historically overlooked segments of the Latino electorate – newly registered voters, young voters, and low-propensity (e.g., infrequent) voters.
Throughout the coming weeks, the NALEO Educational Fund and its national and local partners, including Mi Familia Vota and the National Council of La Raza, will be making live phone calls to voters in eight states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas. In all, live phone canvassers will use micro-targeted scripts to reach out to more than 160,000 thousand young, newly registered, and infrequent Latino voters.
NALEO’s Voces del Pueblo program is also helping to expand the American electorate through its capacity building initiatives. This year our NALEO Online Voter Software (NOVS) is helping community organizations with limited resources across the country coordinate Get Out The Vote efforts completely online. The software provides organizations access to voter file data and a campaign management interface that allows organizations to customize the list voters and their message to these voters.
To complement the NALEO Educational Fund’s massive GOTV operation, we have also developed other critical initiatives that are providing much-needed infrastructure in the Latino community. These include:
- The 1-888-Ve-y-Vota is nationally recognized as the largest live-operator bilingual hotline. It serves as the voter information hotline for the ya es hora campaign and the official Spanish-language hotline for the national Election Protection Coalition.
- The www.veyvota.org web site is one of the most thorough and accessible fully-bilingual voter information websites, serves as a central resource for essential state-specific election information and allows users to locate their polling place and register to vote using an easy to use interface.
- Media companies Univision Communications, Entravision Communications Corporation, and ImpreMedia are committed to the work of the NALEO Educational Fund and Voces del Pueblo. Established an unprecedented model in media and community relations, providing voter information through:
–>news segments
–>public service announcements
–>special programming
–>printed advertisements
–>newspaper inserts (including voter registration forms)
As the leading organization that facilitates full Latino participation in the American political process, the NALEO Educational Fund will be working arduously to ensure that the there is historic participation in November’s election by the Latino electorate. For more information, please visit www.veyvota.org.
The NALEO Educational Fund is the leading organization that empowers Latinos to participate fully in the American political process, from citizenship to public service. The NALEO Educational Fund is a national non-profit, non-partisan organization whose constituency includes nearly 6,000 Latino elected and appointed officials nationwide.
Arturo Vargas is a nationally recognized expert in Latino demographic trends, electoral participation, voting rights, the Census, and redistricting.Prior to joining NALEO, Arturo was the Vice President for Community Education and Public Policy of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).Arturo was included in Hispanic Business Magazine’s List of 100 Hispanic Influentials in 1996 and 1998.
We would like to thank Mr.Arturo Vargas and Naleo for participating in our guest blogger series and for all of the hard work they are doing to ensure that Latinos all over the United States can exercise their right to vote on November 4th.
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