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A petition for Latino early voter data gets a nod of approval from the North Carolina election board

Wendy Mateo-Pascual, left, pauses to chat during a Latino voter event organized by the Hispanic Federation before the November 2022 election.
Kayla Young
/
WFAE/La Noticia
Wendy Mateo-Pascual, left, pauses to chat during a Latino voter event organized by the Hispanic Federation before the November 2022 election.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections plans to include Latino turnout in early voting estimates for the first time. The decision comes after a civic engagement group in Mecklenburg County petitioned the board to establish more inclusive data reporting.

In the lead-up to general elections, the state board releases daily voter turnout estimates, broken down by political affiliation, gender, age and race.

In future elections, the data will also include how many voters identify as Hispanic or non-Hispanic, an ethnic category separate from race. Mecklenburg’s Latino Civic Engagement Committee petitioned for the change in January.

Wendy Mateo-Pascual, a committee organizer, said having the data during early voting will help Latino voter groups focus their efforts.

“That will make a huge difference for us because we will be able to see every day how many Latinos are voting in different areas,” she said. “So we'll have the idea of [where] we have to do more outreach [and] more engagement in particular precincts or zip codes.”

Mateo-Pascual said the engagement committee hopes to meet with the state board in March. One of the issues they plan to discuss is county-level data reporting. Some counties do not include ethnicity data in their early voting reports, but the state board said it would encourage them to begin doing so.

“More than encourage, we want them to ask the counties or mandate the counties to do it,” Mateo-Pascual said. “We want to have that conversation to make sure that it’s in place for the election and the counties know that they have to [report] by ethnicity, as they are doing right now by race.”

Voter ethnic data is collected at the same time as other demographic details through optional disclosures on voter registration applications. Patrick Gannon, the public information director for the state board, told WFDD News that while the data exists, they can’t control how counties publicize voter information.

“The data has always been there. It's just how we've provided it to the public in a more digestible form,” he said. “But anybody, for many years, could go into our absentee file and pull that data about ethnicity, about race, about gender, and other demographics as well.”

Gannon says the state board plans to begin publicizing Latino early voting data in its reports for the 2024 general election.


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Kayla Young is a Report for America corps member covering issues involving race, equity, and immigration for WFAE and La Noticia, an independent Spanish-language news organization based in Charlotte. Major support for WFAE's Race & Equity Team comes from Novant Health and Wells Fargo.