What does Asian America think about the current presidential election? If you only pay attention to the mainstream media, you could come away with the impression that Asian Americans are not involved in the democratic process — or don’t really care. And this may also seem a bit ironic, considering that the presumptive Democratic nominee was born in Hawai‘i, went to school as a child in Indonesia and has a half-Indonesian half-sister .
But a group called Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote has set out to make sure that Asian American votes are counted.
Recent data from a 2006 U.S. Census Bureau report shows that voter-turnout numbers for Asian Americans match those of Latino voters at around 32 percent. But the percentage of Asian Americans registered to vote was only 49 percent, compared to 54 percent for Latinos and 61 percent for African Americans. Yet more than 80 percent of APIA immigrants are U.S. citizens, demonstrating that voter registration remains just as crucial today as it was when APIA Vote first started over ten years ago.
Based in Washington, D.C., with a small but growing staff, APIA Vote emerged from a coalition of national organizations in 1996 that were just becoming conscious of the need to politically mobilize the APIA community.
The founders of APIA Vote came from similar backgrounds in community organizing and civil rights work. Former executive director Christine Chen served as a project manager at the Organization of Chinese Americans at the time and recalled how welfare reform and immigration were the hot issues.
“We would have Chinese elders calling in, asking about their welfare benefits and things like that,” Chen said. “We realized that, finally, the community was beginning to understand how public policy is real to their everyday life. And we thought that would be a great opportunity to take that further, since we had their attention, to translate that into why we need those who are U.S. citizens to also register to vote.”
In previous elections, there had never been a concerted effort to do a national campaign. Most of the work was done on a local level, mostly in New York and California, and primarily within the Chinese and Japanese communities.
“It wasn’t comprehensive in terms of being pan-ethnic,” Chen said.
A conflict with another voter mobilization group, Rock the Vote, which billed itself as the voice of the youth vote, also helped to illustrate the need for APIA Vote.
“We asked them if they would do a public service announcement for the Asian community,” said current executive director Vida Benavides. “They said they didn’t think that the Asian community voted and that they didn’t have the resources to target the Asian youth. I got pretty angry with that. It’s going to take us to empower ourselves.”
Benavides contacted actress and community activist Tamlyn Tomita, and they produced their own public service announcement video starring 21 Asian American celebrities.
In 2004, APIA Vote received funding from the Ford Foundation. One year later, they started to work on the 2006 elections.
Today, APIA Vote is jumping full-on into the presidential race, mobilizing for the November elections with a vast national network of coalition partners that include the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance.
Drafting, translating and printing voting-location information and how to apply for and vote by mail-in absentee ballots represent another part of APIA Vote’s work. They also have participated in and organized numerous events, including the recent Presidential Town Hall at UC Irvine that was regarded as the first-ever national event where presidential candidates addressed voters in the APIA community. The group will also host events at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this year.
Still, Chen and Benavides acknowledge that there is a long way to go toward their vision of a society where all Asian Pacific Islander Americans fully participate in and have access to the democratic process. Language barriers and immigration have played major roles in inhibiting civic participation.
“Voting is still a fairly new concept for our community,” added Chen, noting that it was approximately 50 years ago that the McCarran-Walter Act allowed the bulk of the community to become citizens and then eligible to vote.
“The future is ours,” Benavides said. “It’s up to us to educate and reach out to one another for the purpose of transforming the quality of life for our community.”
