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Report: Social Media Key to Obtaining the Latino Vote
Social networks, videos and Hollywood stars are the tools that different associations are using to entice the 15 million eligible young Latinos to cast their votes, since this is a group that tends to punch below its weight in legislative elections.
“Latinos are on the Internet, so we have to look for them where they are,” Yandary Zavala, communications project manager for Voto Latino, told Efe.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where citizens have to register before being able to vote, instead of the government being responsible for drawing up a list of people who are eligible to vote.
For that reason, getting voters to register has always been an important undertaking for different organizations, which over the years have been knocking down the barriers that made people prefer to stay home than go out to vote.
The passing in 1993 of the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, was a key step in overcoming that sluggishness.
The law, known as the “motor voter act,” allowed registration forms to be sent in the mail and established that the states ought to offer voter registration services in public agencies.
However, the Internet became the key instrument for getting people to vote and was understood as such by the Rock The Vote association, which pressured the Obama administration in 2008 to go national with the automatic registration of voters online.
These efforts to use the progress of digital technology as a means to improve the exercise of democracy were well understood by Latino organizations, the associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, Mark Hugo Lopez, said in a statement to Efe.
This researcher sees the ways of getting out the Latino vote as a combination of the old and the new.
Technology and social networks are combined with techniques that activists used in the 1960s and ‘70s, as they dedicated their lives to the struggle for civil rights and, particularly, to the equality before the law of African Americans.
Nonetheless, in the 21st century, and especially among the Latino population, new strategies have evolved.
“Most Latinos get their political information not only on the Internet but also through their mobile phone connections,” Zavala said.
For the Voto Latino organization, Facebook and Twitter have become essential instruments for “knocking on the door” of potential Hispanic voters, Zayala said.
Get-out-the-vote messages don’t come from one qualified person or a specific association, but are shared on Facebook and go viral on Twitter via retweets.
The power of the anonymous is not incompatible, according to this representative, with the collaboration of Hollywood’s most familiar faces like Eva Longoria and Wilmer Valderrama as a means of motivating voters.
Currently, according to Voto Latino figures, 15 million Hispanics have the right to vote in the United States and, specifically, 33 percent of them are between ages 18-34.
But Pew Hispanic Center notes that the numbers of votes cast by Latinos are below those of other groups in the country, including blacks.
The number particularly diminishes in the mid-term legislative elections, which this year will be held on Nov. 4, marked by the disappointment of some Latino groups about immigration reform.
Published in Latino Daily News
Source: http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/latino-daily-news/details/report-social-media-key-to-obtaining-the-latino-vote/31288#When:20:03:21Z
