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APA Organizations Make Big Push to Register Voters

By May Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

The scene in front of North Ping Yuen housing complex in Chinatown on Saturday resembled that of a community fun day, filled with traditional Chinese classical music and opera, entertainment and food. But this was just one of the final efforts by Chinatown Community Development Corporation (CCDC) to solicit hundreds of seniors citizens to fill out absentee ballots.

“On Tuesday night, we knocked on doors and distributed fliers all over Chinatown and all of the Ping Yuen senior housing complexes telling them about Saturday’s events,” said Pauli Wai, CCDC’s Families and Single Room Occupancy (SRO) project coordinator.

Wai has been instrumental in CCDC’s voter registration campaign since it began in July 2002. She said the main goal of the nonprofit CCDC is to increase awareness among the residents of Chinatown and other Asian Pacific American communities about the voting and political processes of San Francisco.

“I see the Chinatown residents as residents, not as potential voters,” Wai said. “We’re not doing this for some kind of political agenda or swing vote. We just want people to be aware of the politicians and ballots that are important to them. Almost all of the people we connect with are immigrants.”

In the past 10 years, the Bay Area saw a rise in citizenship, with foreign-born citizens making up 12 percent of the region’s population, up from 8 percent in 1990, according to the 2002 Census. About half of Bay Area immigrants are Asian Pacific Americans. This wave of new immigrants has caused many in the APA and immigrant communities to generate more civic and political outreach. As a result, this increase has changed the voting landscape, with more votes coming from the immigrant population.

“We registered voters who have been citizens for more than 20 years and we registered voters who are new citizens,” Wai said.

The Northern California Citizenship Project (NCCP) has been working for the past five years to bolster the civic and political participation of immigrant communities, in hopes of strengthening democracy and social justice. NCCP works with other organizations to engage immigrants in the political scene by holding workshops and seminars that provide voter education.

“I got involved with NCCP both out of excitement and fear,” said Mimi Ho, coordinator for the Mobilize the Immigrant Vote campaign. “There’s a lot of potential in the state of California to put out a lot of right-wing initiatives and anti-immigrant policies. But there’s also so much potential in California to change this. It’s exciting to see neighbors in these immigrant communities help each other out to get out the immigrant vote.”

Mobilize the Immigrant Vote is a campaign that brings together 15 organizations from Chinese, Vietnamese, Iranian, Latino and other communities from Santa Rose to Watsonville. Ho said the campaign wants not only to get community members involved in this November’s elections, but also in other political landscapes — such as their city council, school board and local politics.

David Ho, community organizer for CCDC, said his organization used grassroots efforts to get more than 400 new voters in Chinatown in less than two months. He said he doesn’t think any other groups in the past have chosen the route that CCDC took in doing voter outreach.

“We literally went knocking door-to-door in the afternoon [until] late at night,” Ho said. “This was an ongoing effort. It was very labor intensive, because sometimes for every building that we went to, we only got one person to register. It’s not frustrating but it takes a lot of work and it’s worth it.”

Tan Chow, also of CCDC, said this was a very practical method to exercise because CCDC enlisted the help of neighbors, residents of SROs, newly naturalized citizens and new immigrants to go out and get people to register.

“We had many volunteers in Chinatown who wanted to help, who wanted to get out the vote,” said Chow.

The Chinese Progressive Association, the Southeast Asian Community Center and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance have all put forth effort in voter education within APA communities. Recently, the Southeast Community Center held a voter forum that provided Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian translations.

Anna Wang, executive director of Vision New America, a San Jose-based nonprofit organization that works to increase APA voter participation, said that many APAs are still unaware of the voting process. She’s focusing a mail education campaign in San Jose’s District 7, where 36 percent of its residents are APA.

“There are many APAs who work long hours in restaurants or small businesses, so they get too tired to go to the polls, or they may not get to the polls in time to cast their votes,” said Wang. “That’s why we are sponsoring a mail campaign which informs registered APA voters in our district about the mailing option.”

In November 2001, she did a similar mail campaign in Cupertino, where APAs make up 44 percent of the city’s population. Election results showed a higher number of APAs voting and sending in absentee ballots. Wang said absentee ballots sent in by APAs increased 50 percent from the 2000 elections, the highest number of absentees in the last 12 elections.

Reach May Chow at mchow@asianweek.com.