Voter registration drives

[GPDP]

Now that the US presidential election has come and gone, I got to thinking. A lot of activist efforts around election time focus on registering people to vote, usually with good intentions. A specific example of such an activist group would be LUPE, a group that fights for poor hispanic and immigrant rights, which does a lot of good work in my area, and I personally know a few of their members. Thing is, as someone who thinks voting is more or less a waste of time, I can't quite get behind getting people out to vote, but at the same time I find myself unwilling to state such a stance in the face of a group that sees voting as a right that hispanics should be able to fully exercise, as they believe that without the vote, they essentially have no voice.

I support much of the work that LUPE does in fighting for immigrant and hispanic rights, but when it comes to voting, I am in disagreement, yet I feel like I have no room for criticism, because their intentions are nevertheless good. Am I in the wrong here? Or should I state my beliefs openly when discussing the issue with the people I know who feel strongly about the issue?

I suppose more broadly, what I should be asking is if voting registration drives are good, useless, or even harmful (i.e. they lead people to put their stock in reformism).

[Lardlad95]

Why don't you work on channeling these voters towards local elections that are more likely to affect their day to day lives?

On a national level it's difficult to parse out how the two major parties are all that different from one another, but I never understood why leftist just cede the electoral process as a whole, as if the possibility of building local radical coalitions is just outright impossible.

See what you can do about starting workers rights/immigrant rights parties in your city, county, state. Or if such things already exist in your area, see what they're about. If they're sufficiently radical, help them out. If they aren't, there's nothing saying you can't make them more radical down the line.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Hmm, interesting. It really depends on the context IMO. In terms of voter-drives right now, well in this example, it was undoubtedly an attempt to get out the vote for the Democrats and Obama specifically. So the voter drive - regarless of intentions - is aimed at tieing Latino political needs to the Democrats which would be a loosing strategy when it comes to policies that many Latinos might support or benifit from, specifically when it comes to immigration issues since Obama has "soft-deported" more folks than Bush could.

But if there was more of a movement against direct attempts to disenfrancize people, it might be something worth supporting on priciple - but for radicals the goal would not be in registering people as an end to itself but as a way that people can begin to organize and fight against an attempt at targeted disenfrancizement. The struggle itself would ironically open the possibility to argue that it's the grassroots organization and effort, not voting that actually matters when it comes to people having power in this society.

But that would probably be a short-term thing. Ultimately we need to organize people to fight for themselves and their class, not to stop at the right to vote for the person who's going to end up oppressing you.