La Gente Unida Jamás Será Vencida: The Power of “Changing Demographics” in the 2012 Elections and Beyond

Adequately summarizing the impact of the Latino vote in the United States' November 2012 elections is a difficult task because, at least as of the time of this writing, the existing data is preliminary. But the postelection news headlines and all available exit polls illustrate the increasingly influential power of Latino voters in American politics with Latinos making up 10 percent of the electorate and influencing the results in battleground states (Pew Hispanic Center 2012). However, although there are 23.7 million eligible Latino voters, only an estimated 12.5 million voted in 2012, according to exit polls (Taylor et al. 2012). Furthermore, the largest wave of voter suppression in decades was directed against voters of color, with new tactics, like requiring stricter and more elusive forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship, blatantly directed at Latino voters (NALEO Educational Fund 2012). As voting rights historian J. Morgan Kousser summarized on 18 September 2012: "[T]oday's voter ID and other such laws bear an eerie resemblance to the initial legal stages of the first disfranchisement [during the Jim Crow era]" (Kousser 2012). As discussed herein, the already influential Latino electorate is expected to double by 2030 (Taylor et al. 2012). Unfortunately, we can only expect voter suppression and increasing targeting of Latinos to worsen in the face of the rising power of the potential Latino electorate (Adelmann 2012). But as Dr. Martin Luther King demonstrated, when communities fight discrimination, the arc of the moral universe is long, but justice ultimately prevails (King 1967). A next-generation, multiracial, full-time, year-round voting rights movement is needed to protect and fully realize the inherent power of the potential Latino electorate. Voter Suppression Backfired in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election As examples from Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania show, efforts at voter suppression in the 2012 presidential election backfired. Like many Americans, I witnessed the long lines at the polls caused by cutbacks in the early voting period in Florida. And on Election Day in Miami, I witnessed African American and Latino voters--there were few White voters at those polls--waiting in extremely long lines. I heard the stories of numerous voters of color who had to pay a "time tax" to exercise their right to vote. Facing unprecedented attempts to restrict their voting rights, voters of color defied the odds by winning various court cases that challenged discriminatory photo identification voting laws (Weiser and Norden 2012). Intimidation tactics such as the Tea Party's "True the Vote" initiative (Shen 2012) threatened to deploy more than a million "poll watchers" on Election Day (Mock 2012). African American and Latino voters also faced Election Day dysfunctions egregious enough to cause U.S. President Barack Obama to allude to it in his election night acceptance speech, stating: "We have to fix that" (Froomkin 2012). Advancement Project, where I serve as the director of voter protection, notes many relevant cases of individuals waiting for hours to vote in Florida. One example is Desilynn Victor, a 103-year-old Haitian American woman, who waited in line for more than four hours at her polling place at the North Miami Public Library on 27 October 2012. This Saturday was the first day of the early voting period, which had been shortened to eight days from fourteen by Florida Republicans via a statue amended 1 July 2012 (Fla. Stat. [section]101.657, H.B. 1355). She went home to rest and, with the assistance of voting rights advocates Carolyn Thompson and Uzoma Nkwonta, returned to vote to the cheers of hundreds of other voters still waiting in line. A young Cuban American couple attempting to vote for the first time stood in line on three separate days during early voting. Like many working families, they came to vote with their young children. …