Saturday was a day of action in Chicago’s Chinatown as community leaders mobilized voters to cast their ballots in the 2024 Election.
Asian Americans have been the fastest growing group of eligible voters over the past two decades, according to community leaders.
“We can be the margin of victory for any of these candidates so if anyone feels like their vote doesn’t matter, I’m here to tell you that’s not the case at all. Every single vote counts,” said 11th Ward Ald. Nicole Lee.
Saturday's rally was organized by the Coalition for a Better Chinese American community.
According to the Pew Research Center, a projected 15 million Asian Americans will be eligible to vote this November, making up just 6.1% of all eligible voters.
Theresa Mah made history in 2016, becoming the first Asian American elected to the Illinois General Assembly.
“This is not an easy population to turn out to vote. We have to do a lot of work, right? Not just these kinds of rallies, but we have to do a lot of door knocking, phone calling. You know, everything,” said Illinois state Rep. Theresa Mah.
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While some high school students volunteering with the coalition can’t vote just yet, the students told NBC Chicago they want to do their part to engage the community.
“Traditional Chinese culture, usually it discourages speaking out, so we’re trying to change that by getting people to vote, telling people they have the power to make things happen,” said Eric Chen, CBCAC youth volunteer with the Origins program.
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For the past two weeks, he and other youth volunteers have been going door to door, trying to reach Chinatown residents.
“They don’t normally open the doors, they feel very cautious about people who encourage people to vote so I kinda want to change residents’ perspective on voting,” said Katelyn Tran, CBCAC youth volunteer with the Origins program.
Meanwhile, early voting in all 50 wards of Chicago is now underway. Numbers from Friday show more than 189,000 people have voted early or voted by mail so far.
Around this time four years ago, the Chicago Board of Elections received and reported 455,276 ballots for early voting and vote by mail. Around this time for the 2016 election, the board said 140,856 ballots were received and reported.
Voters can still apply to vote by mail. The deadline is 5 p.m. Oct. 31. Online voter registration has already closed in Illinois. However, you can still register to vote in person on Election Day at your polling place.
