It’s election season and the stakes couldn’t be any higher. The candidates for President are hotly debating issues such as employment, health care, immigration reform, terrorism and environmental protections. Latinos care deeply about these issues and their votes will be critical to the success of any candidate for the White House.
But in order for Latinos to figure prominently in the presidential campaign, they must be registered, informed and mobilized. While the fact that the Latino electorate is fast-growing is undisputed, their true voting power has been called into question, due to historically poor voter turnout. We are working extremely hard to reverse those trends and are more confident than ever that with the support of our partners that we will significantly increase Latino voter turnout in 2016.
For the past 23 years, the Hispanic Federation (HF) has been conducting non-partisan voter education and registration drives targeting Hispanic Americans. HF's Multi-State Civic Engagement and Mobilization Initiative, Movimiento Hispano, is a nonpartisan civic engagement initiative created to increase participation of disenfranchised citizens, especially Latinos, in the civic sphere. In 2016, HF is expanding Movimiento Hispano, continuing its voter registration and GOTV efforts in Florida, New York, Connecticut, and Ohio.
HF’s civic participation model is designed to Engage, Educate, Encourage, Enable and Mobilize potential voters to get informed, register and vote on Election Day. To do that, we conduct community voter forums, civic participation trainings, neighborhood and street-based voter outreach, door-to-door mobilization, direct mail appeals and television, print and radio ads.
In 2016, Movimiento Hispano aims to register nearly 200,000 new voters, mobilize Latinos to vote in the November 2016 Presidential elections, and impact over 500,000 Latinos through public education campaigns.
How will we accomplish this? By partnering with local and national groups to train individuals in voter registration and GOTV and creating a public education campaign on social media, television, radio and print focused on encouraging Latinos and others to register and vote.
For more information on Movimiento Hispano visit www.movimientohispano.org. For information on voting and help registering to vote, call HF’s Linea Informativa hotline at 866 HF AYUDA (1-866-432-9832).
