Democracy, door to door

Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
July 11, 2004

Dressed in a floor-length skirt and black kamar head covering, Hawa Hashi knocked on the door of Timiro Mohamud's Cedar-Riverside high-rise apartment in Minneapolis on Saturday. She wasn't selling anything except democracy, American style.

Hashi, a 17-year-old senior-to-be at Edison High School, isn't old enough to vote this year. Only two years removed from her native Somalia, she won't qualify for U.S. citizenship -- and the ballot franchise -- until she's in her 20s.

But she was among 155 volunteers who plied immigrant neighborhoods in St. Paul and Minneapolis door to door on Saturday registering voters in as many as six languages -- English, Hmong, Oromo, Somali, Spanish and sign for the deaf.

The nonpartisan but left-leaning groups America Coming Together (ACT) and America Votes say that they registered 2,000 new voters in their initiative, Election Days of Action, in May and June.

Their goals are much loftier, however: 700,000 doors knocked across Minnesota, 1.3 million voters registered.

"This is the election of a generation," said Meighan Stone, communications director for Minnesota ACT. "It's important that every Minnesotan who wants to vote, does."

Saturday's afternoon-long registration drive targeted the Summit-University, Thomas-Dale, West Side and Frogtown neighborhoods of St. Paul and the Cedar-Riverside, Armitage, Diamond Lake and Powderhorn areas of Minneapolis.

Volunteers carried multilingual fliers with pictures of African-born and Hispanic citizens decrying underfunded schools, declining access to health care and Minnesota's lost manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile, the fliers said, politicians are spending $191 billion on schools and hospitals in Iraq.

"We're talking to voters about the direction of this country," Donald McFarland, Minnesota director of America Votes, told the volunteers as they gathered in a basement office in St. Paul. "Each time we do these things, this room gets fuller and fuller. Pretty soon we're going to have to rent an auditorium."

Added Ana Vasquez, who led Spanish-speaking canvassers on St. Paul's West Side: "There will be no votes left behind in 2004."

The drive and ones like it in 35 other cities are sponsored by a coalition of labor, environmental, feminist, civil rights and gun-control groups, plus organizations such as the 21st Century Democrats, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Wellstone Action!

"The progressive voice in Minnesota is loud this year," McFarland said.

Hashi, however, said she volunteered simply to get work experience. She chatted in Somali with Mohamud, 74, who was wrapped head to nearly her bare feet in flower-printed traditional garb. Mohamud, who came to the United States in 1994, said she had voted in Somalia, but never in the United States. She eagerly signed a registration form.

"She's concerned about economic issues," said Abdul Jama, a Somali-speaking volunteer who gained his own U.S. citizenship just last month.

"She knew about us because we leafletted the building two days ago."