Will new immigrant voters be election factor?

All this effort does cost money, and Mi Familia Vota is funded in large part by labor unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a powerful force within the Democratic Party.

SEIU has given more than $23 million to Democratic causes and candidates since 2003. SEIU endorsed Obama in February.

Once the newly naturalized citizen voters have registered to vote and gotten to the polling place on Election Day, they may still have problems.

The 90-year old poll worker
“There must be a rule in our county that to be a poll worker, you must be at least 90 years old,” joked NALEO member Gilbert Ynigues, a former municipal official from heavily Republican Tulare County, California. “Maybe they have a hard time hearing, or understanding, and it becomes a problem. Half the time they can’t spell your name so they say, ‘you’re not registered here,’” he said.

“Especially first-time voters, if they’re intimidated in any way, like asking them their name three times, or telling them ‘I can’t find your name,’ they walk out.”

Latinos comprise 56 percent of Tulare County’s population, according to the Census Bureau. Nearly one quarter of the county’s population is foreign born, but more than 70 percent of them have not become citizens.

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Lopez Ramirez said using an absentee ballot is a solution for immigrant voters who aren’t comfortable casting a ballot in person at the polling place.

“A lot of folks don’t understand how to vote here (in the United States),” she said. “We’ve heard, ‘We don’t really know how to work the voting machines, but we don’t want to ask anybody.’ Or ‘we feel pressured after getting in line, there are a lot of people behind us. Once we get into the voting booth we don’t want to take too much time to really read through the ballot.’ Colorado has a history of having the longest ballots in the country.”

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By being able to read the ballot at home three weeks before the election, a voter can study it carefully.

Voters needing help reading Spanish
In Yakima County in eastern Washington state, bilingual county employee Soraya Gonzalez tries to help some of the newly naturalized Spanish-speaking voters who can’t proficiently read English or Spanish.

“They can’t even read the Spanish ballot,” she said.

For such voters, even a ballot initiative translated into Spanish may be an enigma.

Gonzalez said some new immigrant voters look to her for guidance on whether to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ — and she, as a county employee, cannot provide such voter counseling.

Such newly naturalized voters may learn just enough English to pass the language test for citizenship, but that may not be sufficient for them to make sense of a ballot initiative.

And the law exempts legal permanent residents over age 50 from taking the language proficiency test, if they’ve lived in the United States for 20 years or more.

On the Nov. 5 ballot in Washington state are likely to be at least two fairly complex initiatives, one giving terminally ill patients the right to kill themselves, the other opening high-occupancy vehicle lanes to all traffic during non-rush hours.

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