Making Our Voices Heard (with Maria Teresa Kumar)

these next few episodes a series within a series. We'll bring you conversations with some of the most committed, experienced, and insightful people working to ensure that this part of our democracy functions well. These are the people who know how to citizen and are working hard to make sure all of us can do the same through this basic yet profound right that we have to vote and make our voices her. There's really no such thing as sitting

on the sidelines in an election. Every choice is a choice, and as I saw on a recent Instagram post, not voting still help someone win. For this episode, I spoke with Maria Teresa Kumar, the CEO and founder of Voto Latino, the largest Latino voting rights organization in America, which has registered over five hundred thousand people to vote this year alone and helped millions of people understand how voting impacts

their everyday lives in tangible ways. Now you're gonna hear Maria in this interview say a lower number of registrants around three hundred thousand. That's how fast they're moving. In the time since we did this conversation, Vote to Latino has turned up the numbers even more, and by the time you hear this, it's gonna be even higher. One key insight Maria dropped on me in this interview. She said, November three is not election day, it's election deadline. People

are already voting. So let's go now for the interview. Hi, my name is mamar and I'm the founding president of Vote Latino, the largest voter registration outfit in the Latino community, because we believe that a strong, robust democracy depends on all of us. Maria, can you describe what's the typical method of registering people to vote and what is the

Vote to Latino method and why is it different and better? Yeah, So, the typical method is waiting for someone in front of a Walmart and trying to convince them to register and you can imagine how that could be hard if you have a couple of kids in tow right or or knocking on doors right in covid Era, that becomes really hard. And in the Latino community in particular, since there's so much anxiety among anybody knocking on your door, even if you're a U. S. A Wison, that creates another friction

of participation. And so fifteen years ago I set out with my partner in crime Rosario, and she's like, what do you think if we do as a campaign? And that I love that she could drop in the first name though She's so she had done a whole bunch of P S A s. And she's like, do you think we could do anything more than this? And that's around the same time I met her, and I was like, well, how how hard can this be? Oh my gosh. Fifteen

years later, the experiment is finally coming to fruition. So the idea was to register voters online and to register and let the at scale. And this is what during a time when someone was telling us that let the knows didn't speak English, that what was social media with, you know? And how do why would you use celebrity voices, and so this was back again sixteen years ago, and now I can tell you that in that year we

registered two thousand, four hundred people. As of this morning, January one, we have registered over three hundred and sixty seven thousand individuals since January one, and we are talking to roughly fifteen million people a month across our social media channels. Wow, and what's your goal for? Ideally would be endless, but there's an upper limit on the population, right.

So the biggest challenge of the Latino community is closing the voter registration gap, because we have thirty two million Latinos who are eligible to vote, but only half of us are registered. And of the fifteen million that are unregistered, ten million of US are under the age of thirty three and four million of US are brand new voters

since elections. So you have four million young voters who heard the President called their family loved ones, rapists, and criminals who are eligible to cast a ballot this year. And so our voter registration is concentrated in six states where we believe they could make the most impact, meaning that they could flip at Texas, they could flip Florida, they could flip Arizona. They could flip Georgia and North

Carolina and Pennsylvania. And our goal is to register at least five thousand folks, but to be honest, we're actually closer on track to registering over six That's an incredible number. And I want to understand, you've been at this fifteen sixteen years. What have you learned about what what actually works? Because you described as Walmart parking lot scene and I can imagine that does not work. And some celebrity voices probably don't work if they're not really connecting to folks.

So over these years of experimentation, what have you learned about what actually works to get people to register and to actually vote. The number one thing is you have to talk to them, and you actually kept to create a space. Right. So, when we started Vote Latino, if you ask someone to register to vote, but the moment that they walk out, everything that government does for them is broken. Their schools are broken, they don't have access to healthcare, they don't have way E equity. It's hard

to convince someone that voting will make a difference. Right, And so at Vote Latino, when I say we talked to fifteen million people a month, we're educating people about what happens when you have a good government, what happens when you vote, what happens with how do you actually transform the health care system, the educational system, address the environment, get background checks on people, making sure that you have good d as for police, reform that and then people

start to making the connections. And I can tell you that the difference is that when we started doing this work, getting people to make the contection, for example, between protesting and voting was almost impossible. It's really really hard because no one was used to the protesting and they were starting to learn a habit of protesting, and then they would still vote and wouldn't see any difference. This past June, when Vote Latino, we were planning on registering roughly twenty

folks in June. When we connected the tragic death of George Floyd and the protesting happening in the importance of going to the ballot box to change your leadership, we saw increase in our voter registration numbers from the previous month. We registered twenty one folks in three days, and we registered over a hundred thousand in the month of June.

And that was because in the Latino community. And this is where again it's generation, but people don't get it, like what is happening in the African American community resonates and hurts so much in the Latino community because we are experiencing so many unfortunate levels of policing as well.

Under this administration, you have eleven million undocument immigrants that are constantly getting profiled, but in reality, it's sixty million of us, right because no one knows who's documented who's not.

And so when you talk to a mother and talks about having that conversation that talk with their with their kids, it's the same talk, but no one talks about it out loud because people are ashamed and they're they're scared, right well, it's a real anxiety about being targeted and hurt by the people that you may call to your front door because you might have instances of domestic violence

or being shot. There's a horrible incident in Los Angeles where this young man, eighteen years old, undocumented kid, he was moonlighting as a security guard at an auto shop and shortly after George Floyd he was shot close to seventeen times in the back by on duty police officers and he was moonlighting because his parents had lost their jobs to COVID. He was just trying to make ends meet, and there's no accountability sadly in some parts of the

police force. Latinos really get it. And so when we started talking about the issues specifically around health under COVID, when we start talking specifically about jobs under COVID and racial inequities among blacks and Latinos, that was through the roof because even though we don't discuss it, we know that it is something that is an epidemic as well, sadly in the Latino community. And Trump hasn't made it easier. Obviously,

he is very much of your either. It doesn't matter if you're here as a fifth generation American citizen, if you're brown, you might as well have never shown up. I mean, that is that type of strife. And sadly, you have hate crimes really skyrocketing, because it's not just the government, it's all of a sudden the agency that other folks have that say, okay, well, you know, I

just have to point out, sadly, what happened with El Paso. Right, are there stories that you have of making this connection from voting back to the quality of people's lives that sort of keeps you motivated that you can kind of show people who ask you why should I vote, and you have this result that you can point to and say, look, this made a difference. What are those examples for you? So until it was very much small pockets of it,

but we saw something remarkable. For the very first time, we saw Generation X, Y and Z out vote their older generation. And it was also the most diverse group of Americans that ushered in the most diverse Congress. So in twenty nineteen, we brought in the most women, the most Muslims, the most l g pt Q, the youngest generation,

the most Latina, the most veterans, you name it. It was the most that reflected our country, the most American and the most Americans that actually you know, and it only took us four year almost right, that was really easy.

But but what was really exciting about that pieces that and people will say, and this is where we have to make sure that there's a case for why we need diversity and entertainment, why we need diversity in Silicon Valley, why we need diversity in our schools, That new legislative body that reflected our values most came up with four hundred pieces of legislation that is a blueprint to our America that we deeply believe in. It talked about modernizing

our elections. It talked about background checks, It talked about policing and reforming policing. It talked about making sure that there was a path to citizenship for immigrants. It talked about the environment that, oh, my gosh, climate change is real. Let's address that thing. So there's four hundred pieces of legislation that this diverse body was able to discuss and actually pass that now is basically rotting away at the Senate because Mr McConnell and the rest of the Senate

does not look like America. So when people say my vote doesn't matter, like no, no, no, tell me your issues, I bet you they've passed it. I was never able to say that before. You know what, when I hear about the black community or read about the Latin X community, I know enough to know that there's multiple communities within that um and so within the vote of Latino universe.

I'd love to ask you about what that Latino or Latino community is, and in particular those who actually support this president, which you know are headlines that I'm coming across, and you're closer to these voters and the issues. Can you break down some of the segments within the Latino community and that segment that is pro this president. Yeah, So, first of all, we're talking about over thirty countries in

Latin America, right and trying to bring everybody here. So I always remind people that Italy didn't become Italy until they landed right there. Just so that's kind of what we're seeing here, right. But this is the thing in Latin America. What you have is that people still hold onto their roots and then they come to this country and they're reminded that they're anything but an individual, right, they're often times put together and in the Latino community though,

this is where I think there's great opportunity. And when I say that our job at Bote Latino is to market democracy, we're talking to a vast majority of Latinos who are under the age of thirty three. Sixty of all latin X are under the age of thirty three. They're super young. So the mode like the majority of of whites are fifty four, the majority you're sitting down, the majority of Latinos are eleven years old. Like when I say young, they're super young. Not the average, but

it's like the most like were they cluster. So if you were to see like a map and you see all these like little bumps, fifty eight over here, eleven years old over here. Right, So we're very young communities, which is not surprising why they are trying to pass the voter suppression before we could even because they're preparing. They're trying to prepare a disenfranchised group of Americans for the future. Right. And so the other thing I also remind folks is that of Latin X, we identify as black.

We're from my family's Caribbean, right. I was born on Gotta Hannah, right, So that so we identifies black. You also have a whole group of people that also don't identify black right or as of color right, and that gets more complicated. Specifically in Florida is you see a lot of first wave of Cubans that came that were brought over by Ronald Reagan, who very much espoused this idea that free markets are the answer to everything. And it's an older generation that really much believe in what

Donald Trump has to sell. He has scared them to believe that the Democrats are into socialism and communism. And I like to remind them is that if they believe in social Security and if they believe in Medicare, that is government doing good by its people, and that's technically

a government program. And this is where I think that the BIND campaign can improve is that for most Latinos and for a lot of communities of color, we don't have supplemental income that for most social Security and Medicare represents.

Medicare is our health plan when we retire, and social Security is basically our retirement plan when we retire, like nothing else is coming in the door, right, And so when the president says that he's going to take away payroll taxes, that sounds nice as a small business unless your health plan and your retirement plan happened to be social Security and Medicare, right, So so it's kind of

it's opening that up. But but then you also have a very group of folks that are just very older for the most part, that are just conservative and are very much aligned with UH, with anti choice. That's not the case for young Latino's. Young Latinos, the people that

we mobilize our disproportionately. If you ask them what they care about in order of preference, it is right now, it's racial inequities, it's healthcare, it's jobs in that order, and then the environment, and then you talk about immigration. And the sixth one now is talking about gun reform. Those are young people in Texas. You mentioned voter suppression, and we've seen a lot of attempts to discredit parts of the voting process, whether it's the count or the

delivery of mail. Um. I'm curious about the other side. You know, because you work across all the states. What states are doing a good job of encouraging voters, are protecting the vote? Are there any models that we should try to replicate and hold up as a positive example of this is how you support the voting franchise. I love that question. I would say that California, where you are, is one of the best. It's such a large system that is still getting new kinks because it's trying to

modernize quickly. But I'll give you an example. If you're sixteen in California, you're preregistered to vote. That's huge. We actually had to pull out of California because you guys were doing such a great job you guys. Secretary Videas and one of my close friends. And when he told me his plans, I said, well, you're gonna put me out of business. That's fantastic. But that should be your goal,

Like you want to register all the voters. I mean, look, this idea that a third party organization has to do a government function of registering voters is actually absurd. My job should be about encouraging people to vote for an issue and for a candidate, like that's that's what my job should be. Persuading you you know who you should vote for. But a government function, like you don't depend the government. Doesn't depend on a government function to collect

your taxes, you know, not yet. So you cited the great California Republic as one example of, you know, the opposite of voter suppression voter encouragement by pre registering sixteen year olds. What are a few other examples of people doing it right? Yeah, I'd say Colorado and Colorado. You don't have a voter registration deadline. You can just show up with your idea and you can register and you

can vote the same day. That's fantastic, right, And you have pre voting, meaning that can actually vote before the actual November three, because so many people are going to be interested in the election this year, we should think of November thirty as our deadline. That's the last date of vote, and the more we can bank our vote

that is going to make a difference. Because one of the things that I'm concerned with is that there's gonna be so much participation that everybody's gonna wait until the last minute. Now, as a Latina, we wait for the last minute for everything, not this time, guys, I never need to bank their vote. If if I'm talking to my fellow black folk, I'm like, no, CP time, no, no, no, I have one more at least follow up. I think it's about how votilit you operate. You said social media,

you use the word technology. You're engaging people who are under thirty three by and large, What do you actually do? How does it work? What is your technique? So imagine I've with selling you nikes online and you double click on it, right, So you know, we basically market democracy all the time, and we identify where you are, and not to sound creepy, we try to use it for good. Try to get you to registers. Once you register to vote with vot Latino. Then we start actually providing you

with the information that you need. So where's your voting booth? Have you made a plan to vote? Have you? And we try to make it all inclusive. So if you were to tell me that you really cared about the environment, once you're part of our world, we will tell you when it's time for you to call your member of Congress on the environment. If you want to, volunteer will pull you in and you can volunteer from the comfort

of your home. If you text the volunteer to seven three one seven nine, you can just start texting fellow voters to go out and vote about the issues they care about. And then what we do is that for those folks that are really into it, we basically we do volunteer programs where they actually come and get trained. So, for example, on October two, we're going to have our

Power Summit. It's going to be virtual this time. Normally it's in person, but it's usually about five young people that are really aggressive of trying to change to their neighborhoods, and we trained them on everything they need to do, including running for office. And the idea is that we have to flip the script when people say that the system is regularly saying, now, let's be clear, the system

works for those who occupy. We are part of the largest most diverse generation of Americans as time that we flex and that we occupy our institutions. Because they're still using our taxes. They might as well put our taxes to work for good, at least most of ours. They're not using the presidents because he doesn't even doesn't that

that got me pretty fired up. And the idea of of marketing democracy, it's almost voto Latino is like the first step, you know, and it's it's you're following through in terms of the volunteering and the contacting you representative. Are there things that you have planned that you're excited about in terms of how your model is going to continue to evolve. So I'll share with you. We started about four years ago, we started encouraging yan Latinos to run for office. That was part of our you know,

an experiment. And since that time we've had six and people run. Of the six, five of one and they're all the youngest in their chamber, so the youngest and there's Will Boarder, shut Younggester and city Council and currently the youngest in Congress. And so what we would like to do is basically built off of that and just

encourage more people to run for office. I think that what folks don't realize is that young Latinos they've been navigating America for their families long before they turn eighteen years old, oftentimes because they know the language. I was translating from my mom when I was six seven years old, you know, always with this nervousness of when I was with my grandmother in the doctor's office, Am I going

to get her medication? Right? I mean, like some stuff that's kind of big and quite frankly translating less well when I came to school just can conveniently. I don't know how to translate this particular note from this. Yeah, but you're saying that a lot of folks in the Letics community have experienced navigating the system on behalf of

their families, right, for everything but democracy. Right. We know how to buy the best cell phone plan because we're getting marketed that, right, but when it comes to democracy, we don't. And so like only eight out of fifty states requires to education to graduate from high school when you're in places like Texas where close to a good six of our kids are of color. Where are they learning democracy? So we try to feel invital to him. We try to fill that gap, because again, our democracy

is only as strong as our participation. And when we have such a lopside participation, we're only one side with one viewpoint is participating. We get what we get right now in the White House, right, And so our job is to flex. And again we're gonna be the largest generation coming out to the polls. You're gonna have twelve million more young voters than baby boomers for the first time.

Two thirds of them are young people of color. We have a belief in this show about the word citizen, and we are interpreting it not as a legal status, but as a verb. If you were to interpret the word citizen as a verb, what does it mean to you?

I citizen for my neighbor. Right. Our job, my job, I think everybody's job, is to recognize that COVID has exposed over fifty years of what the civil rights movement was about, that there were institutional inequities in our system, that where the fought lines were around race and gender, and if you look at disproportionately the people who are at the front lines. Our communities always knew we were essential workers right, and COVID is exposed what that means.

It means sacrificing, sometimes your family time and sometimes sacrificing your bodies to ensure that our families can be fed. But so can the country can be nurtured. And so for us to citizen right is to address the neediest,

the most vulnerable around us. I do think that COVID, well, as painful as it's been, is giving us an opportunity of a generation f DR right after the Great Depression, had the opportunity to reimagine and think what America meant, and that meant providing public schooling, meant providing social security, it meant providing fair wages because you actually were able to organize under a union, you had, like this, a

whole list of what our priorities were as Americans. COVID is going to allow us to think as audaciously and as big, and what we need to do is that we need to citizen right so that everything is possible to re calibrate where we are. I don't think that there's now an American who can't say that where you grow up in your zip coat, in the color of your skin or your gender don't matter. If anything, COVID

has demonstrated those faultlines are very real. But as you know, I mentioned I have two little ones that are six and eight years old. There technically the beginning of what is called the majority minority country where no one is a majority. I would say, you know, the future has been born and we're not ready. So just like you know, World War One defined America in the world for the twentieth century, one can claim that the twentieth century started February.

And how we actually legislate coming out of that, out of the pandemic is where we are for our citizens, but also for the world at large. Are we going to step up to that leadership that is so so needed? Yeah, watch out America, Maria Terressa Kumar, thank you for your time. I think there's one. I'm already registered and I double check every week. But if I weren't, I would register through Vote to Latino just so you could market democracy

to me and I'd love to experience that. There's also something you made me think of when when you described very young Latin X folks having to navigate on behalf of their families. That's representative democracy right there. Like there's a constituency and you're in a service position and you have to understand and sort of provide in this way. So it's not surprising that five of your six one if that's the group that you're pulling from with that

depth of experience. Is there anything you want to add on this top pick of voting or how to be a citizen? I think more than anything, we just want to make sure that you have a voting plan. Make sure like just like you make a plan to go to the doctors or you know, go go on a date, like make a plan for voting, and try to do it early the fastest you can do it, because I will tell you this, usually on November three, on election day,

everybody's calling the shots. Everybody's gonna say this person is gonna win this year. We're not going to have that, and we have to be prepared. But a lot of people, millions of us, are gonna be voting by mail, and as a result, some of them, it's going to take us sometimes weeks to count them, Like in Georgia took us two weeks after the Georgia Primary to count those all those ballots. So one be a savvy voter. So if someone tells you on November three that we know

who won, they're following you. We don't know, okay, So just give every let it, let it work through the system, because you know, every vote does count. And number two, the more that the folks on the progressive side, the more that people vote, it inspires other people to come along and they feel like they're part of the winning team. And media being the media will start creating narratives of who's winning, right, and so don't wait until the last minute.

Start banking early. And the more that we start banking those votes, the more we can actually control the cycle and inspiring people to come out and saying, oh my gosh, my vote. I do see a difference. I keep telling people that there's only thirty six days un till dawn, but I need everybody to participate. Thank you, thirty six days till dawn. We are looking forward to that sunrise.

Thank you, Thank you so much. We want to thank Maria to Race the Kumar again for taking time out of a very very busy schedule in the middle of election season to talk with us. Please follow Voto Latino on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, visit their website at Voto Latino dot org. There are some amazing resources there. Even if you're not Latin X. You can find this entire episode, the transcript the call to action always at how to

citizen dot com. And if you've enjoyed this episode and others, please leave a review and tell someone you know put it up on social media. Word of mouth is the best way to grow a podcast, and we think this thing we're doing with you here is something worth growing. So we'll see you out there on the socials. Now let's get into the set of actions we're offering up

for this episode. There's a lot, and I'm not asking you to do everything, but I want to give you options because everything feels like it's on the line on the internal front. Here are some of the things you can do. The first thing I want you to do is just prepare yourself emotionally. We have this historic expectation that we know an election result the morning after quote unquote election day, and as I've repeated many times in this episode, we are an election season. These are election weeks.

In November three is just the deadline. But because so many people are voting by mail, because this race could be very close and come down to a few states. Assume we won't know, and brace yourself emotionally for that, plus all the nonsense that you know is going to happen between now and then and possibly after. Make a plan to vote and act on it now. If you haven't voted yet, make your plan. Figure out how you're going to vote, who you're voting for. Plan this like

it's the biggest day of your life. I'm talking about. Get the lent out of your shirt, brush your teeth, get that mouth wash going. You don't just run out into an amazing first date that could be the potential for the rest of your life. So don't just run out and mark up your ballot without informing yourself. Don't just make up the rules. Take the time to figure out how you want to get this done and start. I would even say pause me right now and just

figure out of this stuff out right now. If you can vote early and in person, it's still the most ideal way to vote in this election. If you're unable to do that, if you don't feel safe doing that, obviously, don't do that. But if you do when you have a choice, take that route. There's a great resource with state by state information when we all vote dot org.

Look up your state there, see what your options are, and then confirm them with your county elections website yourself, and if you plan to vote by mail sometimes called absentee balloting and states like Wisconsin, make sure you're registered and fill it out and submit it very very carefully.

You gotta follow those directions to a t. I'm holding my California mail in ballot in my hand right now, and this is confusing and I read a lot, you know, So just take your time with it, do some breathing exercises, double check everything. Don't give anyone any excuse to not count your vote or to challenge it. There's a bone this round here for those who are feeling a little more partisan. But I don't even think in the season we're in now that supporting Joe Biden for president is partisan.

I think he is a pro small D Democrat right now, and the other candidate has shown his colors as not being down for people power. So phone bank or text and adopt a swing state. I'm gonna send you to vote Save America dot com. They have a whole battleground states adoption program. Uh, you don't actually adopt all the people in the state, but you take them on from an electoral perspective to try to make sure people are voting there because it counts a little more because of

the electoral college at the federal level. But you pay attention to your whole ballot. All right, Now, there's more, Like I said, many options. On the more external facing stuff that involves other people, make the phrase have you voted? The new how are you? In your conversations. I want you to check in with the people you care about and be like, oh, that was a crazy week. Have you voted? I want you to log into your zoom and just flood the chat with have you voted? Make

that a social norm. It is healthy peer pressure to encourage people to flex their power. And once you voted, you let everybody know. I want you posting that I voted sticker on your body so they show up in all your web things and your grocery store visits. And I want you posting on social media use the hashtag I voted, with the hashtag how to citizens. Lastly, on the action front, this is a bigger lift, but if you're feeling particularly young and healthy and energetic, volunteer to

be a poll worker. Because of COVID nineteen and the generally older age of our poll workers, we have a severe shortage of poll workers in many parts of the US. Visit Power to the Polls dot org and consider becoming a poll work to yourself. Encourage people you know to volunteer. Bring a friend with you. More poll workers means faster voting means more people get to exercise their power, means a happier Baritune day. Host of how to Citizen a Baritune day. If you take any of these actions, let

us know. Email us actions at how to citizen dot com mentioned voting in the subject line, Brag online about your citizen in using the hashtag how to citizen, and we're always open to general feedback, guest recommendations, actions you have in mind comments at how to citizen dot com. You can also text me I'm at two O two eight nine four eight eight four four. Put citizen in there so I know how you found me and share your ideas that way too. If you prefer texting, I'm

reading them all myself. This has been an extraordinary pleasure We have more voting episodes coming, so stay tuned and more importantly, make your plan or work with someone you know who end vote to make their plan, and let's have record flexing of power. How the Citizen with Barrett Sunday is a production of I Heart Radio. Podcast executive produced by Miles Gray, Nick Stump, Elizabeth Stewart, and barrettun Day Thurston. Produced by Joel Smith, Edited by Justin Smith. Powered by you