‘Su voto es su voz.’ Latinos, how important is your vote during this year’s elections?

Bianca Carreon learned from her father how important it is to vote.

“I do it because my dad is an immigrant,” Carreon, 20, said. “He finally got his papers, but he always says, ‘If we don’t vote, we’re giving up our freedom and our voice being heard.’”

She’ll be voting for the second time this year. While Carreon, a Fresno City College student, realizes Latinos often doubt that their voices will actually be heard, she thinks they will.

Julián Castro thinks so, too. On a tour of California as the new CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, he echoed the rallying cry of Chicano activist Willie Velasquez.

“Su voto es su voz,” Castro said. “Your vote is your voice.”

The non-partisan foundation helps raise money for Latino-led nonprofits. It will be investing in Central Valley groups to promote voter participation, said Castro, who previously ran for president and served as the U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

The need for investment is evident by nearly every voting metric: Latinos don’t vote consistently.

In California, where more than 8 million Latinos are eligible to cast a ballot, the group remains underrepresented as voters. In November 2020, according to data from UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute, they voted at lower rates than every other large ethnic group — white, Black and Asian — in the state.

The 2020 disparity was greater in Central Valley, with Fresno County’s Latino turnout rate 7.1 percentage points lower than the county’s overall average.

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Why don’t Latinos vote?

Low voter participation among Latinos is nothing new, but it is worsening in some geographical areas.

Latino eligible voter turnout in the 2020 general election was the lowest relative to California’s eligible voter population since 2010, according to data from the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. In the 2022 general election, California Latinos had their second worst turnout of the last seven general elections.

The issue begins with lower registration rates, said Mindy Romero, director of USC’s Center for Inclusive Democracy. Latinos often fall into categories that predict lower registration rates, which includes those with lower incomes, less education or have a mistrust in the government.

“It’s what I call a compounding effect,” Romero said.

Many campaigns use likely voter outreach models, which follows voting history to calculate and target the demographics they have a chance at capturing. So, since Latinos are not voting, they are less likely to be pursued as potential voters.

This creates a perpetual cycle in which Latinos continue to receive less outreach, listen to less information about elections and campaigns, and end up being less likely to head to the polls.

In a 2022 poll by the Latino Community Foundation, 71% of California Latino residents said they had not been contacted by a political party or campaign.

“It’s a long game, not a short game,” Romero said. “But when that deeper work is done, it can raise turnout.”

Though Ammy Vajar, 31, has been voting consistently since she became an adult, her parents have never voted because “in our culture, they say it doesn’t matter,” said Vajar, a Fresno City College student.

“It’s on politicians to reach out to our communities because they want our vote,” she said. “They should do the work to ensure they reach us.”

Increasing turnout is the key to this election

The need to increase Latino voter turnout is more instrumental than ever given their growing electorate power.

An estimated 4 million more Latinos are eligible to vote nationwide since 2020, according to Pew Research. That represents 50% of the total growth in eligible voters in that time.

“If you want to mobilize the Latino vote, if you want to get more Latinos to participate, you need a strategy to engage Latino youth,” Romero said.

One solution to increasing their turnout is “quality” outreach, Romero said. Campaigns can’t solely rely on one-time door knocking, flyers or texts. Romero said the key is to build trust and make a repeated case on why a vote should be cast.

Driving young Latinos to care more about elections is a priority for grassroot organizers like Aida Macedo.

Macedo, a lawyer with the law firm Cid and Macedo in Fresno, has volunteered to increase voting rights knowledge in the Central Valley for the last decade. The work has centered around preventing voter intimidation, community organizing and ensuring language access at the polls.

Through that work, she discerned a growing indifference among young Latinos when it comes to voting. They’ve endured a recent pandemic, historic costs of living, unaffordability of college and ongoing climate change, Macedo said.

“There’s a serious apathy toward our system, which I think is fair,” she said.

Macedo believes there needs to be more concerted efforts on showing young people how voting trickles down to their everyday lives.

Latinos have impacted politics in the past, said Alex Saragoza, a Chicanx and Latinx studies professor at UC Berkeley. Central Valley Latinos began running for local offices during the farm worker activism of the 1960s and 70s.

Later on, Latino immigrants became citizens to vote in response to anti-immigrant laws in California, such as Proposition 187 in 1994.

“A lot of mexicanos, implicitly or explicitly, understood that they could be deported,” Saragoza said, “and a lot of the real hard line conservatives were talking about doing exactly that.”

Today, these young Latinos must know “they are a force to be reckoned with,” Macedo added.

“There are people out there who do not want them to vote, who will do everything in their power, so that they don’t get to vote,” she said.