Relatively Few Latinos Eligible to Vote

It’s something to look out for in the coming redistricting tug-of-war. It’s also a partial answer to the question of why Latinos don’t vote.
Only 41 percent of Latinos in the US are eligible to vote in federal elections. In voting and elections parlance they’re called C-VAP, short for citizen voting age population. I think the name explains the process.
The Latino community is young and highly immigrant. So when you eliminate adult immigrants who are not eligible to vote-either because they are resident or undocumented-and you add to that the Latinos who are not yet 18, the number of actual potential voters diminishes. Scrape from that the ones who are eligible but have never registered to vote, and take another layer off for the ones who are registered but don’t vote, what are you left with?
And it’s not that the Latinos who are eligible don’t register or vote, much of the criticisms come from looking at the numbers in terms of percentages. As more Latinos become citizens or become of voting age (last calculated at about 500,000 per year) the overall universe of C-VAP increases. So even if we were to register half a million new voters per year, we wouldn’t put a dent on the relative percentage.
A concern though, is that the new redistricting schemes may be redesigned to count only eligible voters, and not the population as a whole.
Angelo Falcon put it this way in hispanicohio.com:

The percentages of the voting age population that were U.S. citizens was lowest among Latinos (62 percent) than the other major racial-ethnic groups. This compares to 96 percent for non-Latinos, ranging from a low of 66 percent for Asians, 84 percent for Pacific Islanders, 95 percent for Blacks, 98 percent for Whites and 99 percent for American Indians.

So if only voting age population is considered for redistricting, it would dilute the Latino influence. But it won’t be that easy. This is the first time that the Census releases C-VAP data, and

Because the use of citizenship status is an unsettled redistricting and voting rights issue with the courts, it is anticipated that the use of the ACS data for this purpose may be subject to legal challenges.

As always, we’ll be keeping an eye on this fir you.