November 10, 2006
By Marisa Treviño

With another election completed, one has to wonder whether the much-hyped strength of the Latino vote is a reality or simply a spin on the classic fairy tale The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Exit poll results from Tuesday's elections show an increase in Hispanic voting from 2002. Those results appear to confirm a pre-election report by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), which predicted that Latinos would make up about 6% of the vote. That's at least one percentage point up from 2002, but hardly enough to get excited about.

A Pew Hispanic Center fact sheet titled "Hispanics and the 2006 Election" provides some interesting perspectives on why Hispanics might, in fact, be a powerful voting bloc that just hasn't yet arrived.

Hispanics eligible to vote are a smaller portion of the Hispanic population ? as compared with other racial/ethnic groups ? because many adults are not citizens, and many citizens haven't reached voting age. Only 39% of Hispanics are eligible to vote, according to the Pew study, compared with 77% of whites, 65% of blacks and 51% of Asian-Americans.

So are all the predictions of Latino voting clout to be dismissed? No. They're just premature. The coupling of Hispanic youth and technology just might change the equation. The U.S. Census reports that last year about a third of the Latino population was younger than 18. Couple that fact with a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found English-speaking Hispanics use their cellphones to access the Internet and to text message in greater percentages than any other race or ethnicity.

Armed with this data, the non-partisan Voto Latino, which aims to increase Hispanic voter participation, has targeted young Latinos by entering their world of cellphone text messaging and online social networks, such as MySpace. A simple text message from an interested Hispanic youth, or anyone for that matter, prompts an immediate response on how to get a voter registration form. Voto Latino registered about 38,000 people from September to the end of October.

Maria Teresa Petersen, executive director of Voto Latino, says 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month in the USA. Eighty-seven percent of them are eligible to vote. One can quickly see the potential in these numbers.

Though Hispanics historically have had a poor civic participation rate, the immigration reform protests this year could be a sign of things to come. Exit polls this week showed that Hispanics voted heavily Democratic, in part because of the immigration debate.

The voices heard this past Tuesday will only grow louder in the years to come.

Marisa Treviño is a freelance writer in Dallas.

Source: USA Today