New Haven Independent

Henry and Bozeman work for the Hartford-based statewide group DemocracyWorks, which is trying to register more voters in cities and get them involved in the political process. They talked strategy Monday with local activists at Junta for Progressive Action on Grand Avenue.

“New Haven is a grouping of little kingdoms,” explained Steven Koch, associate director of Community Mediation, Inc. His analysis echoed that of counterparts from Junta, Interfaith Refugee Ministry (IRM), Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), and Grand Avenue Village Association (GAVA) — that the Hartford-based organization would do best to tap into the hyper-local institutions already in place.

“New Haven works by neighborhoods,” said Junta Executive Director Kica Matos, offering her help making contacts in Fair Haven. “To reach these communities, find the Junta in every neighborhood.”

Bozeman, coordinator of the DemocracyWorks’ “Connecticut Votes! — Connecticut Vota!” campaign, had come for the insiders’ scoop on doing outreach in New Haven. Her aim was to ramp up “Connecticut Votes!” activity in this city, another urban site of low voter turnout. “It’s places like these where we need to undo disenfranchisement,” Bozeman said.

Statewide, the two-year-old campaign has seen 13,000 citizens registered to vote, but has aims higher than just increasing that number. “We’re not just talking about presidential elections,” said Bozeman, on top of recognizing that registration doesn’t always mean turnout. “We want people engaged at primaries, and at municipal and state levels. We want more general civic engagement.”

New Haven is one of six Connecticut cities where DemocracyWorks is partnering with key groups and organizations, offering voter how-to “democracy workshops” at non-profits, targeting the media, and coordinating registration activities at local events, in an effort to redress low voter-turnout of especially ethnic minorities, low-income people and people with disabilities, women, youth, and immigrants. Having registration cards on offer, hanging posters encouraging all eligible people to vote, and distributing the “Voter’s Bill of Rights” were some of the ways Bozeman encouraged meeting attendants to join the effort. “And just start having conversations, about democracy, about voting,” she added.

Rather than blind dissemination of voter registration cards, DemocracyWorks advocates engaging people in a political dialogue first — for example by citing the stat that voter participation is at 80 percent in Avon, versus 30 percent in Hartford.

“It’s not right to make that comparison,” said Norma Franceschi (in photo), GAVA co-chair and the owner of a Fair Haven grocery store. “Avon is very rich, and Hartford is inner city.”

“That’s why we use that example,” Henry responded, citing more statistics to illustrate upper-class communities significantly outvoting their low-income counterparts. And so a dialogue was started.

Most community-workers in the room were already engaged in voter education in some way, although they reported as many challenges as successes. Franceschi, who said she used to have registration cards on hand at her store before being told that it was illegal, professed confusion about certain regulations.

“See? People don’t know that,” she interjected when Bozeman made reference to former felons’ right to restore their vote.

Chris George, who has been promoting voting with various organizations and as a private citizen, noted that the new registration cards were clearer than the old, but retained certain problems. He cited the lack of a default address and pre-paid postage for returning the cards. He said he would “bet dollars to donuts that two out of five people miss this line,” pointing to a second, un-highlighted question about age after the clearly demarcated question about citizenship in section 1b. He added that military recruiting displays were usually far more visible that voter registration materials at places like public libraries and the DSS, which are required to stock the latter.

Gwen Mills of CCNE said it was murky what non-profits are and aren’t allowed to do, especially when it comes to helping turn registered voters out on election days.

Bozeman agreed that the restrictions on federally-funded organizations’ voter-promotion could be tricky business. She said she herself, as an employee of the non-profit DemocracyWorks, took care to visit both parties’ registrar’s office each time she went. To the concerns about confusion over rules, she responded by passing around a “Voter Participation Toolkit,” the product-in-progress of a DemocracyWorks collaboration with the secretary of state, to provide eligible voters with all they need to know. It looked thick.

DemocracyWorks’ emphasis on broader definitions of political participation was well-received by the group assembled at Junta, which work largely with refugee and non-citizen populations for whom civic engagement has to mean something other than the vote. Ana DeSantiago, who does adult education with immigrants at Junta, welcomed the DemocracyWorks idea of non-voters as civic educators with important voices all the same. She wondered about possible workshops specialized to immigrant communities. “We have to push it past voting,” she said.

Agreeing with DeSantiago, Franceschi cited the importance of civic education from a young age, noting its lack in schools here as compared to in her native Argentina. “I tell people to stop complaining about the mayor or alderman and take five minutes to educate their children,” she said.

George placed responsibility for some of that education on legislators themselves, decrying a Board of Aldermen public hearing to which he’d taken a group of refugees hoping to “give them a view of some transparent civic procedure.”

“It was more like a public embarrassment,” he said, recalling his agreement with an Afghani refugee that, yes, it did seem rude for an alderman to be eating a submarine sandwich through an almost-inaudible public hearing. “They complain people just want to watch ‘American Idol’ and not get involved, and no wonder. We need to make the workings of government more accessible, and more interesting,” he said.

After the meeting, Bozeman had gathered a healthy list of community contacts for possible vote-promoting collaborations, from neighborhood management teams to faith-based networks to the Festival of Arts and Ideas. She seemed encouraged by the new avenues toward raising civic consciousness, reemphasizing education as the way to get out the vote to historically underrepresented people. “We have to collaborate and work with the structures already here, and get the awareness up,” she said.

Henry, executive director of DemocracyWorks, added that although the state had been mostly responsive to DemocracyWorks’ suggestions and proposed legislation, the system for registering voters was still far off what it should be. “What’s been going through my head lately,” said Henry, “is this phrase about kicking down the door and taking a seat at the table… Most minimally, people need to register and vote.”