The Houston Chronicle
November 3, 2006

No march to register by Hispanics

Activists see some increast in voter rolls but fail to reach goal of 1 million or more

WASHINGTON — "Today we march, tomorrow we vote" was the endless refrain as hundreds of thousands of Hispanics spilled onto the streets of Houston, Los Angeles and other cities last spring in protest of a House bill aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

But with Tuesday's election approaching, immigrant-rights activists are nowhere close to delivering on their vow to add a million or more Hispanics to voter rolls in Texas and across the United States.

"We won't be ready for this election, but we will be ready for the next one," said Maria Jimenez, special projects coordinator with the Central American Resource Center in Houston.

Hispanic voter registration kept pace with increases in total registration in some of the cities where massive immigration rallies took place. But the registration totals didn't spike the way activists hoped.

In Harris County, voter registrations since the start of the year by citizens with Spanish-sounding surnames grew 5.3 percent as overall registrations rose 3.6 percent, according to the registrar's office.

But because Hispanics represent a small share of the overall vote, the increase made only a fraction of a difference, with Spanish-sounding surnames now accounting for 14.7 percent of the county's 1,924,573 registered voters, up from 14.4 percent at the beginning of the year.

Elsewhere, elections officials report no major increases in Hispanic registration.

"I haven't seen anything relative to voter registration that is occurring as a result of the marches," said Milwaukee election commissioner Sue Edmond. Her comments were echoed by Danny Clayton, supervisor of voter registration in Dallas County.

Texas, which with California accounts for the lion's share of the national Hispanic vote, posted a gain of 96,023 voters with Spanish-sounding surnames from February to mid-October, according to the Secretary of State's Office. The increase was in line with the growth of registered voters overall, and the Hispanic share of Texas' 13.1 million registered voters remains unchanged at 21 percent, spokesman Scott Haywood said.

Because Texas doesn't track voter registrations by ethnicity, the use of Spanish-sounding surnames offers a method, though not an entirely accurate one, of estimating the size of the Hispanic vote.

Uphill battle for change

•An estimated 11 million to 12 million of the nation's 43 million Hispanics live here illegally and are ineligible to vote.
•More than one of every three Hispanics is younger than 18, the minimum voting age.
•More than 8 million legal Hispanic immigrants have not taken advantage of their eligibility for citizenship. In turn, activists have shifted some of their attention from voter registration to citizenship drives, said Germonique Jones, spokeswoman for the Center for Community Change, a coalition of some of the nation's biggest immigrant-rights groups.
"We spent a lot of our time naturalizing people so that they can register to vote," she said.

•Voter registration is often an expensive, labor-intensive process.
Antonio Gonzalez — president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, one of the groups leading the effort to register Hispanics — said his staff spent 200,000 man-hours two years ago to register 100,000 people.

Other registration efforts such as those led by churches, union locals and grass-roots groups are harder to track.

Though organizers won't hit their registration targets, Gonzalez said Hispanics will still have a big impact on Election Day because they represent the fastest-growing share of the overall vote.

"Latinos are an energized electorate," he said.

But Jimenez, the Houston activist, and Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association, disagreed.

Hispanics have been discouraged, they say, by some congressional Democrats' support for GOP-driven provisions such as the measure for border fencing.

"Having candidates running on the very positions that these mobilizations are against is not going to spark a lot of enthusiasm either for registering or voting," Jimenez said. "I may not even vote."

Lopez, for his part, blamed the Democratic Party for not bankrolling major voter registration drives in a community that historically has leaned Democratic. "There's been an absolute lack of investment on the part of the Democratic Party ... to make the slogan 'Today we march, tomorrow we vote' a reality," Lopez said.

Voter registration is just one measure of the activism that has been stirred by the marches, said Jimenez. The results will come as more immigrants become citizens and as young marchers become old enough to vote, Jimenez said.

"It's a matter of time," she said.