Evlyn Sanchez reaches out to immigrant voters outside Stockton's Plaza Sahuayo in the weeks approaching the election. She is part of a state-wide campaign to mobilize the Latino immigrant vote. (Photo by Angélica Marín)

“I am voting today to exercise my right and to help those that can’t vote,” said Leal, who added that she had voted a straight Democratic ticket. “These poor people come here with the illusion of a better life, because in Mexico, all they had were tortillas and nopales.”

Nopales are cactus, eaten in Mexico both with and without tortillas, and outside the polling place, in the heart of the city’s Latino neighborhood, day laborers gathered around Teresa M.’s food cart, buying their morning cup of champurrado a kind of Mexican hot chocolate. Teresa, a Mexican immigrant who had been living in the United States for the past 13 years, is still undocumented. As she watched voters trickle in and out of the polling place, she said she was disappointed with the low turnout.

“If we could vote, we would,” Teresa said. “Those who have been able to become citizens should vote, and help the rest of us.”

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants like Teresa will be unable to vote today. With the momentum from the immigrant rights marches that took place in May still lingering, many organizers had hoped places like Oakland’s Fruitvale District would be flooded with Latino immigrant voters. But this morning’s slow start at the polls gave these organizers little to hope for.

Evelyn Sanchez, advocacy coordinator with the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, said she had been looking forward to updating the principle slogan of the May marches, “Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos” (today we march, tomorrow we vote). “We were trying to transition to ‘ayer marchamos, hoy votamos’ yesterday we marched, today we vote,” she said.

Sanchez and other Latino organizers have been trying this fall to reach new voters any way possible ⎯ by phone, paying home visits, or through makeshift informational booths. Armed with voter registration applications and pamphlets filled with immigration information, Sanchez toured Latino neighborhoods recently in Alameda County and the San Joaquin Valley.

But Sanchez said that no matter how hard they tried to motivate the Latino immigrants who made it to the marches last spring, it would still be impossible to replicate those numbers.

For the last four years, BAIRC has been part of the “Mobilize the Immigrant Vote,” a statewide campaign that has led many of the voter education and registration efforts this year. MIV grew from a pilot program of 14 immigrant-rights groups into a coalition of 150 nonprofit organizations. During the 2004 campaign, MIV registered more than 20,000 voters statewide.

This year, hoping to interest new potential voters and volunteers, MIV members created a pamphlet containing information on the state measures and recommendations for four of the 13 propositions. The voter guide has been translated into five languages, and includes polling place information and Election Day voter rights.

“When we talked about the barriers that keep people from voting, they always said it was not speaking English, and the lack of faith in the electoral system,” said Renata Austin, an intern with the Services Immigrant Rights and Education Network, a San Jose MIV component.

SIREN only registered 150 voters during this election cycle, one-tenth of its 2004 numbers, and ended up focusing focused more on persuading new voters to remain involved in the political process. As one of the largest immigrant-rights organizations in San Jose, they held community forums dealing with election confusion and fears that often keep people from making it to the polls. As a last resort, they handed out stickers for Halloween candy, reminding people to vote on November 7.

According to a recent study by the California Public Policy Institute, seven out of 10 voters are likely to be white. Of those voters, the majority tends to be highly educated homeowners, with larger incomes.

Even though Latinos are currently the largest ethnic minority in the state of California, they made up only 19 percent of all voters in the 2004 presidential elections.

A 2002 National Council of La Raza report found that immigrants who become citizens are more likely to vote than U.S.-born Americans. In addition, the NCLR reported that between the years 1996 and 2000, the nationwide number of foreign-born voters grew 20 percent, while the number of naturalized citizens increased by 30 percent.

While the population of immigrants who were not yet citizens was 17 million in 2000, the estimated number of immigrants who might come out and vote during the elections could be in the millions.

This past July, two months after the May 1 marches, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and other organizations held a first annual “citizenship day” to help immigrants file naturalization applications. More than 1,000 applications were filed, making organizers hopeful that an increasing number of immigrants would come out and vote.

It takes months on average for a naturalization application to be processed. This would make it impossible for immigrants who filed an application this year to meet voter requirements in time for today’s elections. Latino organizers say that these Latino immigrants will eventually be able to vote, if not in this election, then in 2008.

“I think that anecdotally without seeing the numbers, there is a lot of interest, not only locally but on a national level as well,” said Alvaro Huerta, communications director for CHIRLA. “If you’ve been forced to live in the shadows for years and years, it’s difficult to feel that power to get out and vote ⎯ but it’s really a matter of time. Not ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”