In a mock vote held at the Lefferts Historic House, Brooklyn, some 74 children cast their ballots and elected Senator Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States. The children aged 3-10 gathered at the venue on Election Day, where they filled in voter registration forms before entering a voting booth. Obama won with an overwhelming majority of 65 votes, Senator John McCain earned 8 votes, and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney earned one.

The children were also taught about presidential elections and about how the voting bloc has changed over the years. New England traditional election cake was served as a treat.

This is the first time that the museum has held a mock vote. “We realized that this is a really big election and that it could be a fun way to engage children,” said Elyse Newman, organizer of the event and Education Curator of the museum.

Democratic Party supporters react as they watch US President-elect Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) give his victory speech on television in Harlem, New York, November 5, 2008. 

More work at www.erinsiegal.com or www.rine.wordpress.com.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is stationed at more than 30 New York City polls, in neighborhoods where there is a significant Asian-American presence. Most of the sites are in Queens, including in Flushing, where some who can’t vote because they’re not citizens are nevertheless helping out.

THE SWEET VOTE: CLICK TO PLAY

]]> http://eighteentwentynine.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/the-sweet-vote/feed/ 0 eighteentwentynine img_0699 http://eighteentwentynine.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/wear-your-politics/ http://eighteentwentynine.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/wear-your-politics/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:20:06 +0000 eighteentwentynine http://eighteentwentynine.wordpress.com/?p=320 ]]> by Laura Nahmias and Amy Tennery

by Richard Solash and Brent Lang

On Election Day, Williamsburg’s P.S. 250 is transformed from school to voting site. Representatives of the national Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund are stationed here, in this largely Asian-American corner of the borough, to ensure that translation services are available to voters. They’re also monitoring reports of name misspellings and voter disenfranchisement, and collecting exit poll data. This year, the group has relied more than ever on young volunteers, having started a Facebook group to target this demographic. Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, says that the number of her group’s volunteers nationwide has risen nearly 30% in the last four years, now topping 1,400. Many are under age 30. Among its Election Day volunteers are law school, college and high school students.

Jennvine Wong, a 24-year-old student at Brooklyn Law School and a volunteer for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is stationed at P.S. 250 from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. In 2004, she was a volunteer on Election Day, conducting exit polls. This year, she addresses voter complaints. Rude poll workers and not enough translators are the two major gripes this year, she says. Wong says only three out of the five Chinese-English translators that should be stationed at P.S. 250 are actually available. She peeks at the Asian-American voter exit data that has been collected today: “It has been kind of split down the middle with the older generation voting more Republican and the younger generation voting more Democrat.”

Wong and her colleagues ask Asian-American voters leaving P.S. 250 to fill out a brief survey. In Chinese on one side and English on the other, the 20 questions solicit demographic data and ask which candidate the person voted for. They also ask: “In voting today, did you use an interpreter?” “Was it difficult to vote because translations on ballots were too small to read?” and “Did you encounter any problems when you voted?”

At 10:40 a.m., Wong calls the Board of Elections after she receives an exit survey that complains of a broken voting machine. “I’m still on hold,” she complains, five minutes later.

One of Wong’s colleagues is Mabel Tso, a 28-year-old community organizer for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Election Day is one of her busiest days of the year. She will soon have to leave P.S. 250 to check on fellow fund workers at other polling sites around Brooklyn. Until then, she assists voters in filling out surveys.

“You see them everywhere. There’s another one,” says Juan Padron a 28-year-old public school teacher. 

He’s not talking about the latest fashion trend or cockroaches or gas-guzzling cars.  He’s talking about young election workers – 18 to 29 year olds who carry clipboards or sit behind tables as they register voters and raise money.  Padron would know, because he’s one of them – the countless number of young people who use their free time, nights and weekends to campaign for the candidate of their choice. 

Padron says this year he and several other groups have made a concerted effort to register 18 to 29 year olds.  Studies show young people, like Padron, will have more success engaging their peers.  One study, conducted by Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies showed young people were 18 percent more likely to vote after face-to-face contact by someone their own age. Some campaigns know this and are making an effort to court youth support. They say if they’ve done their job right the age group won’t disappoint when it comes to voting.

“The youth movement? On Election Day you’ll see it. Lines will be stretching around the corner. College students will be skipping class to vote. The youth movement is a tsunami,” Padron says.

Campaign collegues of Padron say he’s their “go to guy” when it comes to capturing young voters.  “He’s great,” says Linda Drigant, a campaign volunteer. “He really knows how to talk to [young people].”

“I’m just direct with them,” Padron says. “I say, ‘Are you ready for Nov. 4? Are you ready to vote?’”  Padron says he finds it easer for both people when talking to someone his age but just talking isn’t enough.  Padron tries to connect with young people on issues important to them. “Young voters are concerned with the same things as everyone else but from a different angle,” Padron says.  “Older people are worried about their retirements. Younger people are worried about even getting savings started.”  Padron says once he engages his peers in the discussion they often register to vote. “I have a pretty good track record [getting them to register],” he says. “If they’ll vote or not? (shrugs).”

Other groups say getting young people to vote means getting them interested and engaged.  For Anthony Reinhart, president of the Richmond County Young Republicans (RCYR) on Staten Island, it’s about face-to-face contact.

“It’s a very grassroots approach to the campaign,” he says. “We get in front of people.” The group recently rented a bus with a PA system, covered it with campaign signs and drove around the city stopping along the way to register voters – especially young ones.

Reinhart says they adapted their pitches for the younger voters by being chattier and using more casual language. “And it helps that we’re in the same age group,” says the 24-year-old.

Reinhart’s group and their presidential candidate John McCain are underdogs in New York but Reinhart sees this as a challenge. 

“Because Obama is expected to win makes it that much more exciting,” he says. “It’s one of those battles where we have to fight that much harder.  [Barack Obama] appeals so much to youth and younger people.  But it’s important to remember the other side: young people do identify with John McCain.” 

Reinhart points to a sister group to his organization, the Manhattan Young Republicans, who just enrolled member number 700. “All of them are young people, young republicans, who want to be engaged,” Reinhart says.

Ryan McVeigh, a campaign worker for Barack Obama, is doing his best to engage anyone.  McVeigh, 24, is new to his volunteer job of collecting donations for Obama’s campaign. It’s his third day walking the streets with a clipboard and so far he hasn’t had much luck. “Excuse me sir. Do you have a minute for Barack Obama?” he asks a middle-aged man pushing a stroller.  The man passes without even glancing in McVeigh’s direction.  But a few minutes later McVeigh manages to hand his clipboard to a young woman who fills out her name, contact information and credit card number.

For young voters or donors it may feel less intimidating, more relaxed to talk to a worker their own age.  Lauren Martin, 20, says she registered to vote after a “young guy” approached her on the street.  She says she had already passed up registration tables staffed with older people but responded to him.  “With an old person it’s like ‘am I in trouble?’ but when they’re my age it’s just easier to talk to them,” Martin says. 

It’s unclear if the efforts of young campaign workers will raise turnout of young voters.  Historically younger voters haven’t voted in large numbers when compared to other age brackets.  But Reinhart says there’s a huge potential for his age group to make a difference in this year’s election.  “To a certain extent the age group is taken for granted – until we get to shine.”

By Gaia Pianigiani

As young men amble by, bouncing to the rhythms of hip-hop, a woman in an embroidered African dress bends down to register to vote at a table along Utica Avenue in Crown Heights and smiles to the girl on the other side.

Damali Christopher smiles back. Her own mother was almost Christopher’s age – 20 — when she came to Brooklyn a quarter-century ago from Trinidad. Now she is a construction worker who has raised four daughters and pays taxes – but cannot vote for president.

“She can go to jail like an American, but she can’t vote,” says Christopher. “I am going to be the first one to vote.”

The community districts that include Crown Heights are three-quarters African-American; most of the older residents are legal immigrants who nonetheless can’t vote. But their children who were born here can. They represent a challenge for Christopher, one of the 30 young people who joined the “The Fifteen Hours Project,” a non-partisan voter registration campaign organized by Medgar Evers College and sponsored by local politicians, businesses and cultural associations.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank that studies the movement of people worldwide, only half of the nearly 2 million eligible black citizens in New York State voted in 2004, compared to 60 percent of state residents of all races.

“We are running into something dangerous: young people don’t believe that people died to give us the right to vote,” says Miles McAfee, the advisory board coordinator at the Medgar Evers School of Professional and Community Development. “We need to educate them.”

Armed with registration forms, guidelines to identify eligible citizens and a huge smile, Christopher, who studies mathematics at Medgar Evers, spent the day recently on the streets of Crown Heights to register voters. Her goal for the day was to register Hispanic and black men, the segment of the population that she believes are the most reluctant.

As the day begins, Christopher wants to register two friends of hers who live in Bedford Stuyvesant, and then talk to strangers on the street. She knows that many of them can’t vote, including two brothers on parole who went to jail together and a Dominican woman who has a green card but lacks American citizenship.

A few young women on Fulton Street tell her that they don’t want to vote. A shop-keeper explains that she has never voted and will never vote because has no faith that politics is going to make her rich. A young man with a shiny square earring seems interested in what she has to say, but ends up asking for her phone number.

Christopher finally manages to register her friend, Elisabeth Gonzales.

“Your vote does count,” Gonzales says from behind the counter at Pollo Pizza Restaurant on Pitkin Avenue. “I’d have registered anyway, but had no time so far, even if at times you get so disgusted with the economy.”

Enthusiasm mingles with disaffection among the young adults in Central Brooklyn. And Christopher understands some people’s lack of faith.

“‘The Fifteen Hours Project’ was my calling,” she says. “At Medgar Evers, they taught me that we change brains when we are united.”

Named after the movie “The Last 15 Hours,” about the final heated hours of Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries’ victorious campaign in 2006, the project was designed to translate art into political action. Its main focus was to spur young people to give themselves representation in their own government, McAfee says.

The campaign registered more than 2,500 voters, according to the organizers.

“Maybe the one person that I am going to register is going to make the difference,” says Christopher.

By the end of the day, she had registered 22 voters. Of them, 19 were strangers and largely women her age. But they also included an 80-year-old woman who had never before voted and a 24-year-old Orthodox Jewish man. Three others were young men from her neighborhood, guys she called “corna boys,” who stand on street corners and do whatever job comes their way.

These young men, she says, are especially hard to convince because they believe that no president will change the way they have to make money, or give them a high-school diploma.

“I tell them to look at the larger picture,” she says. “All together we hold the power to change everything.”

Christopher says that Barack Obama embodies her hope for change, the family man whom she wants to lead her country. He addresses issues such as health insurance and the war in Iraq in a more effective way than John McCain, she believes.

“I don’t like him because he is black — I believe in what he is saying,” she says.

Her family is too rich to be classified as below the poverty line and too poor to afford a family health plan. Even if her mother is West Indian and always knows a trick, an herbal remedy is not always enough, she says.

Christopher says she also worries about the massacre of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. “Yes, I am for my country, but not for the war,” she says. She feels that as a citizen, she has the duty to vote and voting should be mandatory.

However, for Christopher there is more significance to this election because it’s her first.

“My family has no say so,” she says, “so I’m doing it for them, too.”