Arizona groups work to get Latinos 'out of the shadows' and 'into the voting pool'

They gathered Saturday at the state capitol to tell lawmakers they're fed up and ready to register tens of thousands of voters to spur change at the Republican-controlled Legislature

Arizonans "are paying more attention than ever — this Red for Ed movement really woke a lot of people up and all the different communities are asking more questions," said Montserrat Arredondo executive director of One Arizona, a non-profit focused on Latino civic engagement.

About 100 people from multiple organizations promoting voter registration rallied at the capitol. Organizers announced that they are a quarter of the way toward their goal of registering 200,000 new voters for the November midterms.

The voter-registration drive comes amid a spike in teacher and other non-traditional candidates running for the Legislature. The field is the second-most crowded in the past 20 years, behind 2010, when 229 candidates made the ballot in what became a wave year for Republicans.

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One Arizona is a coalition of community groups based primarily in Maricopa and Pima counties. Many of the organizations at the rally, such as One Arizona and Mi Familia Vota, focus on Latino communities.

Despite years of low Latino voter turnout, Democrats are hoping to lure members of the diverse community who are increasingly frustrated with rhetoric from the Trump administration and politicians supporting hard-liner immigration platforms, including the controversial zero-tolerance policy that forcibly separated children from their parents.

'Out of the shadows'

One Arizona held the rally to launch their statewide effort to register new voters.

"For voter registration, we don't knock on doors, we go out to the transit centers, a shopping center, we try to find people where they're at in natural gathering places," Arredondo said.

"We think it's an important year ... to vote here locally," she said. "So far we're pretty close to 50,000 voter registrations between all the groups and in the next month we want to get closer to 100,000."

Speakers told stories of their struggles with voting in Arizona and how they plan to make things better for others.

RELATED: Voto Latino aims to register 1 million new Latino voters by 2020

"We have this whole campaign in Arizona — these eight organizations that are unified under one banner — to bring these 200,000 new voters out of the shadows and into the light," said Libertad Aguilar, a spokeswoman for Mi Familia Vota, "and get them into the voting pool, so that we can actually make a real change in Arizona."

But shifting voter turnout for historically marginalized communities is a challenge.

Despite a nationwide push in the 2016 presidential election to drive Latino voters to the polls, the turnout rate held steady at 47.6 percent in 2016, compared with 48.0 percent in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center.

The number of Latino voters grew to a record 12.7 million in 2016, up from 11.2 million in 2012. Still, the number of Latinos eligible to vote, 14 million in 2016, but do not cast a ballot has remained larger than the number of Latino voters.

That trend extends back to each presidential election since 1996, according to the Pew report.

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