HomeArticleTRP Joins Illinois Latino Leaders and Organizations to Launch ¡VOTA YA! Campaign to Mobilize Latino Electorate and Make History on November 3rd

TRP Joins Illinois Latino Leaders and Organizations to Launch ¡VOTA YA! Campaign to Mobilize Latino Electorate and Make History on November 3rd

CHICAGO – Prominent Illinois Latino leaders representing over 34 Latino-led and
Latino-serving organizations statewide, with a collective reach of over 600,000, have launched ¡VOTA YA!, a non-partisan voter-turnout campaign to encourage every eligible Latino voter to VOTE in the upcoming presidential election.

Campaign leaders gathered outside the James R. Thompson Center at 100 W. Randolph St., the Loop super site for early voting, on Tuesday, October 13th to announce the campaign and share facts about early voting options. Speakers included Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04), Latino Policy Forum President and CEO Sylvia Puente, Puerto Rican Agenda Co-Chair Cristina Pacione-Zayas, and Latino Leadership Council Chair Juan Morado Jr.

According to the Pew Research Center, the Latino voter participation rate in the 2016 election was 48 percent, compared to 60 percent for Black voters and 65 percent for white voters. Today, the Latino electorate includes a projected 32 million voters in the nation and over one million in Illinois. This will be the first election in U.S. history where eligible Latino voters will outnumber those of any other nonwhite race or ethnicity.

“The stakes for this upcoming presidential election are huge,” Pacione-Zayas said. “We have a fundamental decision to make on who we want to lead our nation, and who will effectively respond to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the Latino community.”

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed and exacerbated widening inequities in health, housing, education, childcare, economic development, and citizenship for Latinos. In Illinois, over 3 percent of the Latino population has contracted COVID-19, which is highest among all racial-ethnic groups and over three times the rate of the white population (approximately 1 percent). Combined with past injustices like the imbalanced economic recovery of the 2008 recession, the events of 2020 have raised the stakes for the Latino community as high as ever.

“We are heartened by the calls for Black-Brown unity that we’ve heard from the voices in the streets at this moment of civil unrest, and we urge all those who have taken to the streets to take another step and vote,” Puente said.

“The organizations leading this campaign have direct relationships with Latino communities across the whole state,” Morado Jr. said. “We can’t afford for a single eligible voter to stay home this year—Latinos have to exercise their power by voting, whether by mail or in person, by early voting or on Election Day.”

Organizations and leaders that signed on to the campaign will pledge to:
1. Ask all eligible clients, employees, and their family members to VOTE
2. Promote ¡VOTA YA! on their social media networks, email signatures, and email distribution lists
3. Share facts about early voting and all voting options
4. Give all employees the necessary time off to exercise their right to vote