The NPR Politics Podcast - The Latino & Asian American Voter Registration Gap

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In a pivotal election year, U.S. democracy continues to face a persistent challenge among the country's electorate — gaps in voter registration rates between white eligible voters and eligible voters of color. Long-standing barriers to voter registration have made it difficult to close these gaps, and dedicated investment is needed to ensure fuller participation in elections and a healthier democracy, many researchers and advocates say. Read more.This podcast: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, and voting correspondents Hansi Lo Wang & Miles Parks.This podcast was produced by Jeongyoon Han & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, this is Jake from Tennessee, and I just finished climbing the Tiger Cave Temple Mountain in Thailand at 1,260 steps. The time is 1.05 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, April 4th, 2024. And things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will probably still be making my way down these steps. Enjoy the show.

When he said climbing in Tennessee, I thought he was going to say Smoky Mountains, but he's in Thailand. Cool. So many steps. Yeah, I know. Drink water, man. I don't know why you're doing a timestamp. I'd be like drinking water for the next half an hour. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Hansi Luwong. I cover voting. And I'm Miles Parks. I also cover voting. On today's show, we are looking at who is registered to vote in U.S. elections. There have been big gaps for a long time in voter registration rates between white eligible voters and eligible voters of color. Hansi, when we're talking about eligible voters of color,

which specific groups are we talking about? We're talking about Black, Asian, and Latino citizens age 18 or older, and their voter registration rates have trailed behind the rate for white adult citizens for years. And this is according to the Census Bureau's current population survey, which I have to note, unfortunately, does not have enough survey participants who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native or as Pacific Islander to come up with reliable estimates for those groups. But for my reporting, I've been focusing specifically on Asian Americans and Latinos because they're the two of the fastest scoring groups of eligible voters in the United States, and their rates are among the lowest. So if you're interested in having a healthy democracy with strong participation in elections from eligible voters, regardless of their race or ethnicity, this is not a good sign. We've noted this has been a problem for a long time, but where do things stand now? Well, the data that we have, the most recent data that we have from the current population survey

shows that, you know, based on the national estimates from the last two federal election years, 2022, 2020, you can see this disparity in registration rates between white and Asian eligible voters around nine percentage points. And between white and Latino eligible voters, there's a gap about 13 percentage points. And that brings us to the why. What is behind these gaps? Miles, there are some structural issues in play here. What are some of the barriers that can make it harder for people to vote? Yeah, I mean, I think when people hear these numbers, the impulse is to be like, oh, darn it.

Like, I wonder why this is happening. But I think it's important to realize I reported a story kind of looking at the history of voter registration a few weeks ago, and it kind of blew my mind a little bit. Voter registration was implemented in America over 100 years ago specifically as a means. Historians have found that it was implemented specifically as a means to make it harder for immigrants to vote. So the idea that voters of color have lower registration rates than white people, at the time that voter registration started coming into America, that was a feature, not a bug. And so I think it's important to see that as we talk now about trying to solve this problem, that this is not really by accident. But, you know, we see a wide disparity across

America of how easy it is to register to vote. I think one emblematic example is that not every state in the U.S. has online voter registration. There are a number of states, including Texas being the largest one, where you actually have to mail in a form or go into your local election office to register to vote, which obviously, when you think about anyone who does not work a nine-to-five job or does not have complete stability in their life, That is a really difficult bar to cross in 2024. Miles, I want to quickly go back to something you just said. You talked about voter registration arising as maybe an intentional barrier to allowing immigrant communities to vote. I mean, what's the alternative? It seems like you have to have some kind of voter registration, right? Or am I wrong about that? I mean, for the first hundred or so years in the U.S., you really didn't, specifically

because, you know, traditionally voting has been a local based thing where a lot of local officials kind of knew everybody in their community. But in the early 1900s, as there started to be a lot of fear about the amount of immigrants that were coming over, specifically from Eastern Europe. Many states started implementing stricter laws about what people needed to do to register that turned voting into something that was a thing you had to do on one day versus when you added registration element. You know, a lot of experts talk about how it becomes voting is now a two-step process. And so it just makes it harder for people to do it.

You know, I think one other thing we should keep in mind is that in the early part of the history of this country, depending on your race, your gender, your age, you were not allowed to vote in this country. And so we're talking about a very different electorate today than when this country first started. And Hansi, we've been talking about some of the barriers, some of the things that can make it harder to vote, like not having access to online registration. Those kinds of barriers could affect anybody.

But do these barriers disproportionately affect eligible voters of color? They do in many ways. You know, many Latino and Asian American eligible voters are naturalized U.S. citizens, and that can come with extra barriers to figuring out the registration process, language barriers, for example, the lack of familiarity with the electoral process here in the United States. And there are folks who are working, you know, lower wage jobs, just trying to get by day to day. And it can be hard to put getting registered to vote at the top of their to-do list. You know. Two other systemic barriers worth pointing out here. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Asian Americans and Latinos were among the least likely to say that a political campaign or group contacted them

in the run-up to the 2020 elections. And in some states, there are restrictive voter ID requirements that make it especially hard for many eligible voters of color to get registered because Latinos and Asian-Americans who are eligible to vote are more likely than white eligible voters not to have a driver's license that's not expired, for example. So in many ways, we have a system for mobilizing voters that is not meeting the needs of, again, the two fastest growing groups of eligible voters in this country. You know, naturalization ceremonies are often accompanied by voter registration drives. You can register to vote in most places when you get your driver's license. Is there something else that's going on that's preventing naturalized citizens or voters of color from registering to vote in large numbers? Yeah, I mean, even when people, Sarah, are naturalized citizens, I think it's important

to realize that many people come from communities who are a little bit wary of interacting with the government. You know, an expert I talked to was talking about how if you have family members who potentially are undocumented, or if you're seeing people tweeting about how immigrants are taking over our elections, you know, a lot of conspiracy theories right now in 2024 are focused on this idea that undocumented immigrants are flooding the country specifically to steal the election this year. So if you just have that veil and that kind of partisan tension around the idea of voting and registering to vote, I think there are people who are really happy to be here who just say,

wow, I'm really not going to bother with this thing that could present more trouble than it's worth. Okay, let's take a break. When we get back, how does this problem get solved? And we're back. As we said before the break, this gap between voter registration among white voters and voters of color, it's not a new problem. Hansi, what's being done to try to fix these disparities? Well, you have community organizers and advocacy groups doing voter registration campaigns. They're stopping and meeting people at senior centers, supermarket parking lots, outside public assistance offices. I recently shadowed a group called Make the Road Pennsylvania

in Redding, Pennsylvania, about two hours northwest of Philadelphia. There are growing Puerto Rican, Dominican American, and Mexican American communities there. And I met Catherine de Pena. She's been doing voter registration work for a couple years now. And she told me there's a very common conversation she ends up having with a lot of eligible voters. So I say, oh, it don't matter.

I'm not voting because it don't matter. I'm not voting because it doesn't change anything. So I don't know why you're asking me to go and vote. And I say, OK, but nothing is going to change if you don't do anything. You know, so a lot of the work these community organizers are doing is really trying to build some level of trust in the electoral process so that people feel that it's worth participating in the system that many folks feel have left them out or haven't made space for them. And part of that is trying to just make it easier for eligible voters to get registered by literally putting a computer tablet with an online registration form right in front of them so that they can fill it out right there in the parking lot, right there on the sidewalk. You know, many Latino and Asian American eligible voters are very interested in politics. But in many places around the

country, there is no infrastructure ready to engage that interest and to meet, for example, language needs. So you're seeing advocacy groups, community organizers stepping into that void. You know, in recent years, the idea of voting has become and voter registration has become kind of contentious. You know, we've heard, the idea of voting has become and voter registration has become kind of contentious. You know, we've we've heard Republicans claim without evidence in most cases about voter fraud and call for tighter restrictions on voting. Miles, from your reporting, is there pushback against these kinds of efforts? There is. I mean, this is kind of one of the underrated aspects of since 2020 of the kind of voting wars that we talk about of issues that Republicans and Democrats just view very, very differently. Since 2020, we've seen laws

flowing through a number of state legislatures. The one I think about passed last year in Florida that increased penalties on these sort of third party registration groups that basically made it harder for these people to do what they want to do, which is register to vote, increase penalties on if these sorts of groups make mistakes. They, you know, made it more difficult to register as one of these groups. And I think when you dig down into the data, I was looking at an analysis done by University of Florida political scientists that found that, you know, Latino voters, the ones we're talking about here, use these sorts of groups to register at more than five times the rate of white voters. And so when you talk about cracking down on these sorts of groups, you really are talking about making it harder for these communities of color to register.

And I think election officials are also at their wits end, too, because they are constantly saying they're underfunded. They also have trouble being a voice in a lot of these communities. They can't reach every single voter in their county or city. And they see these sorts of groups as filling a void. And so cracking down on them just makes it really hard for a number of people to register to vote. And Hansi, you know, this kind of outreach that Miles is talking about, it's not going to work overnight. We've said this is a long-term problem. What can you say about how much progress, though, is being made or still needs to be made?

Well, you know, some researchers point out that there are some potential solutions that research suggests could help a lot of eligible voters of color get registered. And that includes automatic voter registration and same-day registration. And these are approaches that some states have taken, some states have not. And so it really is a bit of a grab bag, depending on where you're living, how easy it is for you as an eligible voter to access the ballot. Yeah, I think that those sorts of policy changes, you know, the automatic voter registration or same-day voter registration that Hansi's talking about, I feel like kind of scratched the itch of what you were talking about earlier, Sarah, of like, you can't just say we don't need voter registration at all.

I understand it creates a new barrier, but most people I think would say, well, you need some sort of list. But I think trying to get rid of this system where voting is a two-tier or, you know, when you think about a runoff election, a multiple-tier process, we have to register, then you have to vote once, and then you have to vote again. Trying to simplify the voting process, I think generally election experts see as a way to make it more inclusive. I mean, the reason that this matters, right, is because for democracy to work, people have to participate, people have to vote. And that means including people across the population. How might elections change if more people were voting?

Well, it could make election results harder to predict. It could disrupt the political polling industry. But it would also mean that election results would include the votes, the voices of parts of the electorate that this country has never heard before at the ballot box. I think that's what's so fun about this is like no one has any idea what it actually would mean if America had full participation, you know, in elections. And I think that I think is in a lot of ways refreshing to many voters to find out. We're going to leave it right there. And we will be back in your feeds tomorrow with the Weekly Roundup. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Hansi Luwong. I cover voting. And I'm Miles Parks. I also cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.