Washington, DC – The nation’s leading Latino leadership organization, the NALEO Educational Fund (NALEO-EF), has joined with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., to help inform, engage, and mobilize Latino voters. This 2006 voter education and mobilization effort is an unprecedented partnership between the nation’s premier Latino organizations, prominent community leaders, and Univision Communications, the country’s largest Latino media company, to mobilize the Latino community for the midterm elections on November 7. The effort’s centerpiece is a toll-free hotline to assist Latino voters with the voting process.

Lack of access to accurate and timely information is a key barrier to voter participation in the Latino community. To address that barrier, NCLR is partnering with NALEO-EF to staff a toll-free hotline 1-888-Ve-Y-Vota (1-888-839-8682) with call centers in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. From 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. (EST) on Election Day, more than 40 trained live bilingual operators will help voters locate polling places and ensure that their rights are protected. Since 2004, the NALEO-EF hotline has helped more than 15,000 Latino voters nationwide, providing information on registration, absentee voting, and general sample ballot questions.

On the ground, NALEO-EF will monitor polling places in established and emerging Latino communities such as Anaheim, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Santa Ana in California; Houston, Texas; and New York City. Nearly one hundred monitors will visit polling places throughout these communities to help ensure that polling places are accessible and that eligible voters are treated fairly. NCLR helped train local groups who will be monitoring polls in Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

About NALEO-EF’s Voces del Pueblo Program
The NALEO Educational Fund’s Voces del Pueblo voter engagement program seeks to engage, inform, and mobilize Latino voters in an effort to promote a culture of electoral participation among our communities. Since its inception, the program has reached more than one million young, newly registered, and infrequent Latino registered voters across the country. Since 2000, the program has established itself as a nationally recognized voter mobilization program. It has made significant contributions to the study and practice of increasing Latino political participation in the United States. Through field experiments in collaboration with the Yale University Civic Engagement Project and Ricardo Ramirez, Political Science Professor at the University of Southern California our efforts have been able to demonstrate that this important cross section of the Latino electorate can be mobilized and increase turnout on Election Day.

About NCLR’s Latino Empowerment and Advocacy Project (LEAP)
LEAP seeks to increase Latino and immigrant civic participation and political engagement by: (1) training a multistate network of community-based organizations (CBOs) to organize field campaigns and promote sustained civic education and participation; (2) testing and documenting campaign strategies to identify effective models that reduce participation barriers and increase interest in the process; (3) conducting research, policy analysis, and advocacy to promote policies, programs, and investments that support growth in immigrant and Latino civic participation; and (4) linking this emerging electorate with nonpartisan, issue-based advocacy campaigns promoting full integration of immigrants in mainstream society. LEAP seeks to produce measurable increases in Latino electoral participation and, over the long term, build local capacity to strengthen the nonpartisan foundation for participation and mobilization so that those increases are sustained.

For more information, log on to www.naleo.org or www.nclr.org

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