Source: The Monitor, McAllen, TexasJan.倉 23--Sarah Chavez approaches politics with the zeal of a missionary.The University of Texas-Pan American senior estimates she spends 40 or more hours a week registering people to vote, getting them into classes to become voting registrars, making follow-up calls and, now, running the Battleground Texas Club at the University of Texas-Pan American."I find that I'm just carrying around a clipboard and I ask people if they want to get registered and it just becomes part of what you do," she said, as she stood outside Cine El Rey on Monday, looking for potential marks to sign up to vote.Chavez, whose parents' missionary work brought her to the Rio Grande Valley, worked the crowd with other Battleground Texas volunteers during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at the theater. Inside the theater and out, Chavez persistently and cheerfully pestered event-goers, reminding them of the importance of voting.She did the same to passers-by Wednesday outside the UTPA library -- which is the way she normally spends her lunch break, she said."There's actually one guy, he's really great," she said of a student she met on campus. "I talked to him five times about it and he finally said yes and got deputized (as a voter registrar). And he's registered a few voters."Tuesday, Chavez held first meeting of the UTPA club for Battleground Texas, a statewide organization founded by former Obama campaign workers that is seeking to break the hold Republicans have on the state elections.'A NON-VOTING STATE'More than 2.7 million people voted for Gov. Rick Perry in his last re-election campaign in 2010.That was enough for Perry to handily win re-election -- with 55 percent of the vote, he finished more than 12 points better than his Democratic challenger.But despite the ease of his victory, Perry earned the vote of only one in five of the more than 13 million registered Texas voters in 2010, and only 15 percent of the state's total voting age population. In the 2012 election, Texas ranked 48thout of the 50 states and District of Columbia for turnout among eligible voters, according to an analysis published in The Washington Post.Democratic activists believe those nonvoters hold the potential from them to break their shutout of statewide offices, which now goes back 20 years."Texas is not a red state," said Ellis Brachman, a spokesman for Battleground Texas, belying conventional wisdom. "It's a non-voting state."The key,24小時迷你倉Brachman said, is to engage people in the process, which can be as simple as conversing with them. But a grassroots approach takes time, he added, tamping down expectations for this election year."It's not just about 2014. It's a long-term process," he said.RESULTS?Battleground Texas' goal of making the state electorally competitive made headlines when the group launched in February 2013. In the last half of 2013, the group raised $3.5 million in conjunction with presumptive Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Forth Worth state Sen. Wendy Davis, and $1.8 million on its own.But its true impact has been harder to gauge, especially without a major statewide election to test it.Brachman said he could not immediately access the number of voters the group's volunteers have registered in Hidalgo County. Calls to the Hidalgo County Elections Department seeking the number of new registered voters -- by Battleground Texas or otherwise -- were not returned. Chavez struggled to estimate how many people she's personally registered, but thought it was probably a three-digit number.Unsurprisingly, the chairs of the two major parties in the county disagreed on the group's potential impact."No matter what, it's still highly Democrat, so it doesn't matter," said Javier Villalobos, the chair of the county Republican Party.Hidalgo County Democratic Party Chair Kelly Rivera Salazar said she thought the outside group had energized some of her members. She said maintaining that energy will be critical to sustaining Democratic momentum from the hotly contested local primaries in March to the general election in November, which is generally not as important to Hidalgo County voters."If more of us came out to vote, particularly in the general election, I think we could have a huge impact in turning Texas blue," she said of the county, the seventh-most-populous in the state in the 2010 census.But even if turnout did increase in Hidalgo County, it would be impossible to discern the role Battleground Texas played.Whatever the outcomes in 2014 and beyond, Chavez will know she made a difference."I do. I do," she said when asked if she thought her work could be enough to change the course of statewide elections. "If we contact people that haven't voted before, we can change this place."___jfischler@themonitor.comCopyright: ___ (c)2014 The Monitor (McAllen, Texas) Visit The Monitor (McAllen, Texas) at .themonitor.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉旺角
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