The State of the State for Washington Latinos

Hello, world! A quick introduction before I get to the main point of this blog post: my name is Zach Duffy and I am conducting a project for the State of the State for Washington Latinos course in conjunction with Seattle University Law School’s National Voting Rights Advocacy Initiative initiative, led by Professor Joaquin Avila, a nationally recognized Latino/a voting rights expert who has successfully argued two voting rights cases before the United States Supreme Court. I am also being assisted by Naomi Strand, a 3L at SU Law.

In my own research, I have been looking at the representation of Latinos in Washington State’s local voting jurisdictions, and examining the electoral methods and demographic factors that may be contributing to what I have started to find is a severe lack of Latino representation  – even in areas with very large Latino populations.

This all makes a couple of stories that have made the headlines very interesting to me. The first, an article in the Visalia, California Times-Delta, serves as an example of how even local voting districts like Visalia’s school board can be set-up in such a way that minority voices within them are disenfranchised. Juan Guerrero’s effort to change the school board to a district-based election system is not an isolated case, but the fact is that even forty-something years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, there just really isn’t enough research on whether minority candidates are being systematically denied access to local offices. That’s where I come in for Washington State, and I think I’ll find some really compelling information.

The second piece,  an AP article addressing the immigration reform efforts of one of the nation’s most prominent Latino rights organizations – the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) – notes that one of MALDEF’s top priorities is “protecting Latino’s voting rights when legislatures take up redistricting after the Census, probably on an expanded geographic scale than in previous years because of growth of the Latino population.” This just serves as a reminder to me that even with the voting rights work that is going on around the country, new and unpredictable challenges to Latino enfranchisement lie ahead. Still, here’s to a beginning.

Going to Olympia to discuss policy with state legislators becomes a tricky task when said legislators are dealing with an $8 billion shortfall in the state’s budget. Everyone is hyperaware of the potential budgetary implications of the issues you bring up, and quick to point them out. This made for a somewhat challenging environment for our group of students to pitch their policy recommendations. On the other hand, the budgetary focus of our reception illuminated an important aspect to my research that I had not previously considered.

My colleague Pedro Galvao mentioned in a recent post the importance of following laws with more adequate enforcement. What this trip emphasized for me is the importance of following laws with proper funding.

Along with classmates Nick Dollar and Pedro Galvao, I researched Latino voting rights in city council elections in Pasco, Washington. Our research was designed in part to look for violations of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA). Among other provisions, the VRA protects minority voting rights by requiring certain jurisdictions to provide bilingual elections materials and voter outreach.

My research found that the implementation of bilingual programs and election ballots in Pasco doubled Latino voter turnout in the first two years after they were introduced. This is an important achievement in a town where Latinos comprise 56% of the population, yet comprise only 5% of voters in local elections and have no representation on the city council.

The situation is very similar in other towns in eastern Washington, indicating a widespread need for bilingual election outreach. The VRA responds to this need in its regulations, but the law was passed with no budgetary allocation to help states and counties actually pay for bilingual programs. A staff member of the Washington Legislature’s Committee on State Government & Tribal Affairs who we spoke with about our research aptly called the bilingual requirements of the VRA an “un-funded mandate.” That is, the federal government has required action on bilingual election materials by local government but provided no source of funding. Practically this makes these programs dead in the water for local and state governments facing tight budgets.

This revelation comes as no shock, since difficulties in translating policy from the national to local levels is an all-to-common feature of federalism. However, this comment did reinforce in my mind the need for Washington State to consider drafting its own voting rights act, something already accomplished in California. The budget shortfall likely prevents such action for the moment, but drafting a state voting rights act might not only help to provide more funds for bilingual programs, it could also reinstate the important judicial recourses to voting rights violations that have been progressively eroded in the federal Act by a number of U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

On March 15, 2009 there were 4,000 international observers present to watch the Salvadoran presidential elections. They came from the European Union, the U.S. Embassy, universities from all over the United States and Latin America, U.S. churches, and lawyer associations. I was one of the 4,000 diverse international observers.

My experience as an international observer caused me to reevaluate my own research on political mobilization in Pasco, Washington. In my research, I criticized political parties in Pasco for their lack of outreach and mobilization efforts towards immigrants and minorities. In the past, political parties in the U.S. provided transportation to the polls and even went as far as feeding families in need as a way to influence their vote. This still happens today in the U.S. on a smaller scale but in El Salvador, political parties made this a regular practice during the 2009 presidential campaign.

For example, the right-wing ARENA party, who had dominated the presidency for the past 20 years, bought fried chicken from a franchise akin to KFC and fed the many families in rural El Salvador who could not afford such luxuries. Other common practices were giving away bags of rice with a political party’s propaganda plastered on the front and of course the classic ride to the polling site. In light of the extreme poverty and the material incentives that political parties had to offer, I couldn’t help but view this as a form of bribery.

It now seems to me that voter mobilization efforts, whether in the U.S. or El Salvador, would be better left to nonpartisan organizations. Instead of lamenting the fact that U.S. political parties are no longer mobilizing immigrants and minorities as they did in the past, I now see their lack of voter mobilization as a positive change. This is not to say that Get-Out-The-Vote campaigns by political parties in the United States are based on bribery. Rather, I mean to say that nonpartisan efforts to mobilize immigrants and minorities is a surer way to guarantee that the decision of the voter is truly their own. For this reason, nonpartisan organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, should consider launching a voter registration campaign and voter outreach programs when the next election cycle comes around.

Many Americans fulfill their civic duties by sending in letters or calling and emailing their state representatives to voice their concerns on particular issues. Few citizens, however, will take the effort to travel three, four, or five hours to talk face to face with their state representatives in order to change their communities for the better. This is exactly what eight-hundred Latinos from cities like Pasco, Yakima, and other eastern Washington towns did on March 13 for the annual Hispanic/Latino Legislative Day.

The eight-hundred Latino youth, adults, and elderly set a record high for the event where they voiced their concerns in Olympia over issues like education, the economy, housing, and immigration. On this day, state representatives, their assistants, and Governor Chris Gregoire herself spoke with the crowd and listened to what these citizens had to say.

This event exemplified the United State’s most valued acts, the practice of democracy, of meeting face to face to deliberate and discuss citizen’s most pressing needs.

Of course, the event didn’t happen by itself, the Hispanic/Latino Legislative Organization organizes this event every year. 

My research showed that community organizations like the Hispanic/Latino Legislative Organization make civic engagement possible among a greater number of people, no matter if they have a lot of experience at the state Capitol or no experience at all. My research also showed that community organizations are some of the most effective vehicles to increase civic participation among Latino communities. And of course, the Hispanic/Latino Legislative Organization’s most recent event further proves this point.

This is why community organizations in general need to be strengthened in Washington. Volunteer with a community organization or donate to their cause; when we have a working democracy where everyone has a say in the big decisions, we have a better community and a better nation.

For more information about my research, click here