Philadelphia Asian Activists Practise Get-Out-The-Vote Skills

BY TONY WEST/ Philadelphia’s fast-growing Asian ethnic communities are learning how to flex their muscle at the polls.

SEAMAAC, a social-service agency founded 30 years ago to address the needs of South Philadelphia’s Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants, has seen an explosion of other Asian newcomers since – from China and Korea, from the Philippines and Indonesia, from Myanmar and Bangladesh, from India and Pakistan. Asians and Pacific islanders soared from 74,000 to 107,000 from 2000 to 2010. Many of them have since become citizens.

But their concerns are more likely to catch the ears of public officials if they vote. And just because a person has been granted citizenship does not mean they know how to vote.

“There is so much misinformation and disinformation out there,” said Thoai Nguyen, SEAMAAC’s CEO. “Even naturalized citizens don’t always know their way around the system.”

This fall, SEAMAAC launched an innovative outreach program to see if it could get more Asian American voters to turn out for the Nov. 4 general election. It was working jointly with our Asian American organizations in New Orleans, Boston and Chicago.

The target was simple: to get Asian American occasional voters to make it to the polls this year.

Data from the nationwide Voter Activation Network can identify every registered voter and which elections they have actually voted in. This list was checked against a database of common Asian surnames. SEAMAAC workers targeted every potential Asian voter between Broad Street and the Delaware River, Vine Street and Ritner Street for canvassing; they made phone calls all across the city.

In this group, they concentrated their fire on voters with “mid-to-high-propensity” voters rather than historically disengaged ones. These are the voters where intensive outreach is likeliest to increase turnout, explained Victor Yang, SEAMAAC’s civic-engagement coordinator.

And intensive it was. SEAMAAC turned out 50 volunteers for phone-banking and door-knocking. “These methods are by a long shot the most-efficient way to increase turnout,” Yang said. “Decades of research have shown they can increase voting by 20% among this population, as opposed to maybe 1% by mailers.” The volunteers worked the phones and streets during the last two weeks before the election, notching 3,300 voter-communication attempts.

They won’t know how well they did, though, until March 2015, when VAN finishes processing the date from the 2014 elections.

To Nguyen, these volunteers were a precious harvest in themselves. Many of them were underage students or were not citizens. “Some of the youths were our most-passionate volunteers,” he related. “They’d tell the elders, ‘I can’t even vote but I’m so motivated I’m asking you to vote.’”

Voting is just the culmination of a holistic process of civic education that SEAMAAC has long been pursuing. “We work with existing ethnic communities as well as our individual clients,” said Amy Jones, SEAMAAC’s director of health and social services. Elder groups and youth groups are particular targets, she noted.

Just because a person knows some English does not mean they know enough to understand voting rules, follow politics or understand the issues. Election materials in languages other than English and Spanish are rare – even when state law mandates them. SEAMAAC attempted to plug the gap this fall by developing a Mandarin-language information sheet highlighting policy differences between Gov. Tom Corbett and his opponent Tom Wolf. “There was such a craving for this material,” Nguyen reported.

However, Nguyen noted, “We do not want to say anything remotely resembling a partisan stand on any issue or for any candidate. All our volunteers tell their contacts is it’s important that their voice be heard.”

Educating Asian Americans on the democratic process is challenging. They represent hundreds of different cultures and languages. And while some come from vibrant democracies, others emigrated from nations where the wise citizen keeps his head down and pays as little attention as possible to who rules them. They need to learn about the rough and tumble of American politics, where it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Language is at the heart of Asian American voter-protection issues. When Asians with poor English run into a problem at a polling place, telephone translators are supposed to be made available to them. But this often does not happen. Some of these voters have learned earlier that they had certain rights – but are unable to express themselves in tense conversations with poll workers on election day.

The election is over; long live the election. The spring municipal primary is just six months away now. SEAMAAC is already studying its approach to this election.

“We’ll be in the trenches for the next decade,” Nguyen summed up. “But we’ll get better at it.”