Excitement Is in the Air as New Citizens Learn to Vote in America

Two flights above a packed performance of a Cantonese opera at Chinatown yesterday, an equally rapt audience listened to instructions on how to pull back the curtain of a voting booth.For Yan an Shen, a new citizen who at age 69 is voting in an American election tomorrow for the first time, tips as simple as proper curtain-closing are fundamental information.“In China we stood in line and they had already written down who we should vote for,” Mr. Shen said in Mandarin through a translator. “There’s no privacy. It’s not very Democratic there. They controlled us.”A record number of new immigrants should turn out for tomorrow’s voting, according to the predictions of the New York Immigration Coalition, which boasts of having registered more than 250,000 foreign-born voters in the past eight years.Among tomorrow’s first-time voters in New York City will be tens of thousands of immigrants from countries without a tradition of free elections. As these individuals prepare for the novel experience of voting freely, community leaders are scrambling to dispel confusion over the most mundane tasks, such as opening the curtain or depressing the lever, or over more deep-seated concerns, such as language fears or a lack of faith in political accountability.In New York, where the population of refugees from countries of the former Russian federation has exploded to more than 300,000 since the borders were opened to them in the late 1980s and the 1990s, the community is still shifting to democracy after a lifetime under a communist regime.“There were really no elections in Russia,” the president of the Russian-American Voter Education League, Vladimir Epstein, said. “Part of our voter education is to show that the politicians depend on them, that it’s a real competition between people trying to get real political seats, and each vote counts.”In Russia, Mr. Epstein said, the main incentive to vote in staged elections was to prove party loyalty and avoid being blacklisted by the KGB. The only significance of elections was that on that day, he said, strictly rationed food would be released and stores that usually were barren would be stacked with such delicacies as oranges, cheese, and salami. “You are rushing to vote, then you are rushing to buy,” Mr. Epstein said. “On the day of elections you are coming into a store and it’s like a paradise.”Now, having registered hundreds of voters for this election and been host to various voter-education workshops, Mr. Epstein said he thought Russian voters were increasingly grasping the concept of a participatory democracy, where elections actually determine who will hold government office.As an example, he said a common question he now gets is whether somebody can vote for President Bush if the person is enrolled as a Democrat. “Don’t worry, you’re registered,” Mr. Epstein tells concerned community members. “We explain to them, be patient, you have the right to vote in general elections for anybody you want.”Among immigrants from Afghanistan, where many longtime citizens never felt their vote mattered, that country’s first elections earlier this fall and America’s engagement there are mobilizing the community in new ways, according to the executive director of the magazine Afghan Communicator, Rameen Javid.“Usually they’re people who have their citizenship but could care less. Now things are different,” Mr. Javid said, placing the New York community at 25,000.”With all the things going on, everyone is feeling the electricity here, going out and voting, getting their voice heard.”At the Chinatown community center yesterday there was an air of purpose as the room, packed mostly by senior citizens, studied the principal act of American citizenship. The immigrants learned the most basic voting steps, such as which levers to press, how to say a Chinese name in English, and how the closed curtain ensures a vote’s privacy.The executive director of volunteers for the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, Chan Ming Chien, expressed but one disappointment: that a request for a sample voting machine did not come through, and so instruction was based instead on an old video.While he said the local vote was split between Democrats and Republicans, what mattered to him was getting out the Chinese vote in large numbers. About 800,000 people in New York City are Asian Americans and about 450,000 are Chinese.In past elections the Chinese translations of Democrat and Republican had been reversed with the English translations, according to Asian Americans for Equality, causing some Chinese to vote unwittingly for the wrong candidate. Voters were advised yesterday to vote by candidate, rather than by party.It was one of a series of meticulous instructions conveyed by the executive director of the Asian American group, Margaret Chin, who said she has observed more interest in this election than ever before from new immigrants. “There’s a lot more excitement,” she said. “A lot more people want to learn how to vote and are registered.”

Excitement Is in the Air as New Citizens Learn to Vote in America

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