By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

In this year of political firsts, Malcolm Smith has secured his chance to become the first-ever African American politician to preside over the New York State Senate (he’s also the first Democrat in four decades).

But for this Smith had to earn the support of two Latino senators from The Bronx who seem to have strong-armed fellow Democrats into granting one of them, Pedro Espada Jr., the position of majority leader, before they would support Smith. (This is an unprecedented split, since tradition holds that the Senate president also serves as majority leader.)

“Latino Punch”: Espada on El Diario/La Prensa

The New York Times, which reported on the new power distribution, said the deal makes Espada, who has just returned to the State Senate, “arguably the most influential Hispanic elected official in New York.”

“It’s a moment of great pride for our community,” Espada told El Diario/La Prensa newspaper. “It’s the first time in this state that we celebrate a power sharing agreement. Smith will occupy the first position and I, the second, in legislative and state affairs.”

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Election Day, November 4, 2008. (Photo: FlickrCC/Sergiocapitano)

On Election Day, the Feet In 2 Worlds team spread out to polling places in immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods across the U.S. to report on how foreign-born voters experienced this historic day.

Our contributors covered voting in battleground states Florida and New Hampshire, as well as Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York:

• Macollvie Jean-Francois reported on Haitian-Americans and other voters in South Florida. She talked to those who voted before Tuesday and then covered polling sites in the morning and in the afternoon.
• Aswini Anburajan went to Harlem in the morning: she met a man in his fifties voting for the first time, a woman who marched in Selma and a Senegalese immigrant, a Puerto Rican couple, and a Trinidadian immigrant. She then went by Union Square to record the palpable excitement in lower Manhattan, before heading to Jackson Heights, Queens. There she found a Babel tower of electoral interest, complaints of election law violations, and had an extraordinary sidewalk conversation with two Bangladeshis and an Argentinean outside the polls. She also went on the air on PRI’s The World and sent us audio interviews with voters.
• Eduardo A. de Oliveira reported from New Hampshire, where he talked to a Vietnamese voter, and also found time to interview Brazilians in Massachusetts. He also appeared on WNYC, New York Public Radio.
• Martina Guzman talked to Latino families who came out to vote in Southwest Detroit, met an African American man who had tried to vote for the first time in Louisiana in 1955, and in the evening she marveled at the predominantly black city’s raucous celebration of Barack Obama’s victory.
• Suman Raghunathan reported on immigrants having trouble voting in Astoria, Queens, and then met Filipino, Egyptian and Indian voters at a firehouse in Jersey City, New Jersey.
• Yan Tai reported on high levels of turnout among first-time and immigrant voters in Chinatown and on an Asian American group’s complaints about barriers to immigrant voting.
• Pilar Marrero reported from Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, where residents were excited with the possibility of a fellow Chicagoan being elected president.
• Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska talked to Polish voters in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who also came out in big numbers.
• John Rudolph wrapped it all up with news analysis of Obama’s place in history.

NEW YORK – Yan Tai, World Journal reporter

As Election Day drew to an end, an Asian American watchdog group said there were more problems among Asian American voters than people thought.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a civil rights organization based in New York, said Tuesday that for many Asian American voters things did not go that smoothly. The group sent 1,400 attorneys, law students and community volunteers to cover 130 polling sites in eleven states with large Asian American populations which have seen election day glitches for Asian American voters in the past.

Problems cited by the group included long lines, delays, and poll-worker confusion over ID requirements, as well as anecdotes of voting rights violations. These problems were also experienced by other voters, but the group argues that the problems hit Asian American voters harder because of language barriers.

The group received hundreds of complaints via its Election Day hot line, said Margaret Fung, AALDEF’s executive director.

The problems reported included:

— Voters who could not find their names on the voter rolls. For instance, at P.S. 250 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, several voters claimed they had voted in previous elections but their names were not on the voter rolls.

— Improper requests for voter ID. At P.S. 94 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, one voter was told to go home to get an ID in order to vote. No interpreters were available to explain why this was needed.

— Racial remarks used against immigrant voters. At P.S. 94 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, two Arab American voters asked a few questions, and after they walked out, AALDEF volunteers heard a poll worker say, “They look like terrorists to me.”

— Violation of voters’ civil rights. In Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a Chinese American grandmother needed assistance voting and asked her granddaughter to help her cast her ballot. A poll worker prevented her from bringing her family member into the voting booth, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

— Inadequate assistance in Asian languages.

— Broken voting machines.

— Delays and long lines and scarcity of poll workers. In New Orleans, some Vietnamese American voters had to wait two hours to vote at Sarah T. Reed High School in Orleans Parish, while at Mary Queens of Viet Nam Church, voters had to wait almost three hours to vote.

GREENPOINT, NY – Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, Polish Daily News and FI2W reporter

A long line of voters crowded around P.S. 34 on Norman Avenue in Greenpoint, a predominantly Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The line was at times so long –in the morning at any given moment there were around 300 voters– that some people just gave up, saying they would have to come back later. Others were hoping that their employers would understand and would not punish them for coming late to work.

“I’ve never seen anything like that here,” said Krystyna Holowacz, a Greenpoint activist, while waiting for her turn to vote. “Usually it takes five to ten minutes to cast a vote in Greenpoint. Today it’s more than one hour.”

Some voters were very excited to take part in this historic election, others looked very serious and described their participation as a duty.

Older Polish immigrants stood in line among numerous young Americans who have recently moved to this increasingly trendy neighborhood. And while election fever has strongly held the country in its grip for a long time, among Polish residents of Greenpoint this was a new phenomenon.

In the past, Polish immigrants, while deeply involved in their home country’s politics, were barely interested in the American electoral process. This year, however, despite differences in their opinions on who should be the next president, Poles were showing up at polling sites in much larger numbers than in previous years, with a new feeling of empowerment.

FI2W reporter Aswini Anburajan interviewed Polish voter Darius Gieczeweski in Manhattan. He voted for the first time in a U.S. presidential election this morning.

[audio:http://www.jocelyngonzales.net/FI2W/fi2w_DariusG.mp3]

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In the midst of the swirling allegations of fraudulent voter registrations, I thought it would be useful to explain how most of the nation’s immigrant citizens become legally registered voters. Federal authorities are investigating alleged voter registration fraud by the community group ACORN, and a controversial recent report warned of up to 2 million non-citizen immigrants voting nationwide.(Click here for more of Feet in 2 Worlds’ coverage of the report on non-citizen voters, released by a publishing house the Southern Poverty Law Center designated a hate group.)

Most immigrant rights groups focus their large-scale — and, by law, nonpartisan — voter registration efforts on ceremonies where immigrants officially become U.S. citizens. Concentrating on citizenship ceremonies ensures that the people who register to vote are citizens. The lion’s share of newly- naturalized U.S. citizens register to vote this way.

Registering to vote if you are not a U.S. citizen is a felony. This means that if you are an immigrant who isn’t a citizen and you register to vote, you are breaking federal law, and are subject to deportation.For this reason alone, immigrant rights groups are very careful to make sure they do not register non-U.S. citizens to vote.

The ceremonies themselves are huge and moving affairs where hundreds or occasionally thousands of immigrants become citizens after years of waiting to make their way through the quicksand of the legal immigration system.(Check out GOOD and Reason magazines’ recent charts, which outline just how many years this process takes – six to ten years in a best case scenario, twelve to twenty at its worst).Voter registration rates at citizenship ceremonies are typically very high: usually about 75-90% of new citizens choose to register, a rate higher than the 2006 national average of 68% of all citizens eligible to vote .

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In many states including New York, last Friday was the deadline to register to vote in time for this year’s presidential and congressional elections.

As of today there are six or seven states in the “tossup” category — depending on whether you ask Pollster.com, CNN or Real Clear Politics. In the midst of this close race, several states (including Virginia, one of the states that have retained battleground status over the past few months) are reporting record numbers of new voter registrations pouring into election offices. Undecided voters in those states have increasingly become the candidates’ elusive prey via a no-holds-barred multimedia ad blitz, as Feet in 2 Worlds has reported over the past few months.

Many constituencies have fallen into the “swing voter” category in this election cycle: Latinos, immigrants, white middle-class mothers, white working-class men, even so-called Reagan Democrats. With Barack Obama leading John McCain by only five percentage points in today’s daily Rasmussen tracking poll, these swing votes will prove crucial to winning in November.

According to a controversial new study, immigrants who are not American citizens are the latest addition to the swing voter crowd.

That’s the central claim of a new study [click for .pdf file] by David Simcox released last week under the title: How Many Non-Citizen Voters? Enough to Make a Difference: The Impact of Non-Citizen Voting on the American Elections.

The study alleges 1.2 to 2.7 million non-citizen immigrants have illegally registered to vote throughout the country, and could tip the balance of this year’s election.

However, civil and immigrant rights groups raised questions about the impartiality of the study, which was commissioned and released by The Social Contract Press, a publishing house headed by John Tanton.Tanton founded the national anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center recently added to its list of hate groups. (more…)