Each month, the list of Latino voters who have promised Gabriel Quintero to cast a ballot for Joe Biden has steadily grown. Quintero works the night shift at a foundry in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he settled in the nineties, after moving from Mexico City. Outside work, he is known as a vocero—someone who spreads the word—and a leader of a volunteer effort to increase turnout among Latinos in Wisconsin. “In the beginning, I was very skeptical,” Quintero told me of the initiative, which was started by a Milwaukee-based advocacy group, Voces de la Frontera Action. As someone who has not yet gained the right to vote, Quintero couldn’t conceive why anyone would choose to forgo theirs. In conversations with relatives, close friends, and members of his church, he realized that a sense of alienation was at play.
“A lot of them asked, ‘Why go voting if my vote won’t make a difference?’ They thought the margins of victory were much larger than they actually are,” Quintero said. Over the past several months, the group has been trying to persuade twenty-three thousand voters to support Biden in November—a number roughly equal to Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state four years ago. The work has been painstaking because of distrust sown in the community by a federal immigration crackdown and the state’s history of voter suppression. So far, nearly eighteen thousand voters have pledged to back the Democratic nominee; Quintero has persuaded fifty people, triple the number he had initially hoped. “And that’s only me,” Quintero said, alluding to the fact that he is one of five hundred voceros in Milwaukee. “If each one of us can draw some fifty voters to the polls, just imagine how that number grows.”
In Wisconsin, Latinos are now the fastest-growing minority group; roughly a hundred and eighty thousand will be eligible to cast ballots in November. Although their share of the over-all population remains small, their votes could make a difference in a state that Trump narrowly won in 2016. Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of the organization, believes that Trump proved victorious only because turnout among Black, Latino, and younger voters was notably low. “We have a community that does vote infrequently,” she said. During the 2016 election, Neumann-Ortiz grew frustrated with the traditional approach to political canvassing, which she thought relied on “stranger-to-stranger” interactions. She also found that the addresses on file for Latino voters were out of date, and that the rolls left out thousands of people who had been removed after failing to vote. Under Wisconsin law, the Elections Commission can purge rolls of voters who do not cast a ballot in four years and fail to respond to written notices. The year after the 2016 election, three hundred and fifty thousand voters were removed from the rolls.
In the weeks before the 2018 midterms, Neumann-Ortiz tried a new method. Her organization’s ability to persuade potential voters to cast ballots hinged on the trust that Neumann-Ortiz and her team had tried to instill among Latinos in the state. Over the years, they have conducted everything from immigration counselling to labor organizing. Their general strikes had rallied tens of thousands of workers, made headlines, and left dairy farmers scrambling to find lecheros to milk their cows. As the midterms approached, Neumann-Ortiz gathered more than four hundred voceros and asked them to reach out to people they knew in the community who could vote. They created a statewide list of more than five thousand voters—most of whom had never cast a ballot or no longer appeared on traditional Democratic Party canvassing lists. On Election Day, according to the organization, turnout in heavily Latino areas surged by seventeen per cent compared with four years earlier. The Republican governor, Scott Walker, ultimately lost to his Democratic rival, Tony Evers, by slightly more than thirty thousand votes. High turnout among Latino and Black voters in Milwaukee and other parts of the state was seen as a major factor.
This year, the logistical challenges of registering voters during a pandemic have proved almost as considerable as the political stakes. In April, the primaries in Wisconsin showed how much could go wrong in November. Evers had tried to postpone the election, owing to the coronavirus, but he was overruled by a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court. Fearing infection, many poll workers chose to stay home. Only five out of a hundred and eighty polling sites opened in Milwaukee. Long lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots stretched across city streets. At a time when Wisconsinites were urged to practice social distancing, state law required them to obtain a signature from a witness for mail-in ballots. On the eve of the primary, the Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots would be counted only if they were postmarked by Election Day. Turnout decreased across the state, but it dropped most dramatically in minority wards. According to data released by the city of Milwaukee, the average voter turnout in Latino and Black wards was thirty per cent lower than in white wards.
Community leaders viewed the Supreme Court’s decision as part of a decade-long effort by local Republicans to keep minorities away from the polls. Enacted in 2011, Wisconsin’s voter-I.D. law is among the strictest in the country. A study by the University of Wisconsin found that the new law had deterred or prevented nearly seventeen thousand registered voters, many of them low income or racial minorities, from casting their ballots in 2016. What’s more, gerrymandering by the state’s Republican leaders is among the most radically partisan in U.S. history. According to an analysis by Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on redistricting, “Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of house seats even with a minority of the vote.” The extreme gerrymandering has also disenfranchised minority voters. In 2017, ProPublica found that Republicans had drawn the Milwaukee County line in such a way as to combine a sprawling white suburb with sixty-per-cent-minority neighborhoods in the city. After the redistricting, the new district was eighty-seven per cent white.
In November, the pandemic could again be used as a vehicle for voter suppression, as the disease has ravaged the state’s Latino community. At the local peak of the pandemic, this spring, Latinos, who make up less than seven per cent of the population in Wisconsin, accounted for more than thirty-seven per cent of its infections. Luis Velasquez, a Voces organizer in Madison and a pastor at the United Methodist Church of Wisconsin, said that many voters were voicing concerns about Trump’s handling of the pandemic. “They’re doubting the leadership,” he said. A majority of Latino voters are unable to work remotely, because they are employed in construction, dairy, and service industries that require workers to be present. “Our people are the ones doing the essential jobs,” JoCasta Zamarripa, Milwaukee’s first Latina alderwoman, told me. “They have to get up in the morning and go in to work physically.” Zamarripa said she was seeing new spikes of the virus in her district, but she seemed confident in the Elections Commission’s plans to avoid a repeat of the primaries. “We cannot have that again,” she said.
Velasquez, who was born in El Salvador and is a DACA recipient, said that many members of his church had sided with the Republican Party in the past, and that some even saw Trump as a messiah. Now they are willing to consider political views contrary to their own. “People are quick to dismiss information coming from the media or the élites, but their reaction is different when they say, ‘Wait a minute, it’s Luis! It’s Pastor Luis, who I know,’ ” Velasquez told me. Quintero, the fellow-vocero, has begun reaching out to people on his list—in some cases, to remind them to register and request an absentee ballot, and, in others, to offer a ride to the polls. This year’s election carries special meaning, as it will be his daughter’s first. And, although Quintero is not yet a citizen and cannot vote, he sees his work with Voces as a personal way of swaying the outcome in November. After Trump’s 2016 victory, he had grown alienated and apathetic. Trump’s vilification of Latinos had gained him votes instead of hurting him politically. Friends of Quintero’s who had lived in the United States for decades had been told by emboldened Trump supporters to go back to their home countries. They were loathed for no other reason than their physical appearance. At work, conversations about politics ended in violent altercations. Quintero ultimately resorted to silence, as a remedy for polarization. Four years later, he hopes that Wisconsin’s Latinos will be loud enough to tip the election.
