You’re running out of time to register to vote in the Primary Election as the deadline is just one week away, on May 1st.
We attended a virtual press conference Monday where officials from the organization ‘New Pennsylvania Project’ stressed how important it is to vote in each and every election.
“We’ve had a big impact already on the ecosystem as it relates to getting Pennsylvanians registered to vote, ”
The ‘New Pennsylvania Project’ is a two-year-old organization with the mission to get more Pennsylvanians registered to vote.
“As many of you know, we are in a crisis in this moment in terms of voter registration, There are more than 1.2 million Pennsylvanians who are eligible to vote in this moment but choose not to be registered for various reasons.”
And that’s a major reason why Kenner created this organization to get more Pennsylvanians out there voting in each election, even ones considered to be an “Off year” like this one.
“We want to make sure that were getting people an opportunity to get out there and vote and how important it is”
Gibson is one of the people who goes out to different Pennsylvania communities to get people engaged in voting.
“We center communities of color; we center the immigrant communities, and we center the youth in our work, I will tell you that of all of the black folks here in the commonwealth who are eligible to vote, twenty one percent of all black folks who are eligible to vote are not registered. That number jumps to thirty fiver percent for Latinos eligible to vote in the commonwealth, but not registered. And that numbers even greater in the Asian Pacific Islander community, forty one percent of the Asian Pacific Islander community here in Pennsylvania eligible to vote and not registered.”
Kenner says these communities are the ones in which the voter registration gap exists, but last year their first real year as an organization they were able to collect twenty thousand voter registration forms and this year they have a goal of getting twenty-five thousand more Pennsylvanians registered to vote.
Looking closer to our region of Pennsylvania Tina Pritts, the Voter Registration and Election Director in Somerset county says there are about forty seven thousand Pennsylvanians registered to vote in the county.
“We want to make sure that we are in our communities really connecting and we consider it as building relationships with the folks that we see that they just don’t see us once and don’t ever see us again. That they’re seeing us at multiple locations all over the place,