Josie Arredondo Herrera doesn’t know where she would have voted for the statewide special election had she not stumbled upon the pop-up vote center in the parking lot of Boyle Heights City Hall in early November.
She was evicted from her Boyle Heights home earlier this year and is still getting to know her new neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.
To Arredondo Herrera, Boyle Heights is still home. It’s where she picks up her medical prescriptions at the local Walgreens, attends Sunday worship at nearby Resurrection Church and gets free vegetables from services offered inside Boyle Heights City Hall.
That’s how she learned about the pop-up polling place on Nov. 3. The vote center was accessible for Arredondo Herrera, 60, who has never voted by mail. “Always in person,” she said. “To make sure that my vote is there.”
She described the pop-up vote center as secure, safe and convenient. “I know the people. I know the area.”
Voting close to home
Arredondo Herrera is one of the more than 2,100 people who voted in person in Boyle Heights after pop-up vote centers were made available in the neighborhood beginning Nov. 1. The vote centers were set up near Mariachi Plaza, in the parking area of the Boyle Heights City Hall, and at the Boyle Heights Senior Center.
The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk announced the addition of pop-up polling locations on Oct. 27, after Boyle Heights Beat reported that no polling places were located in Boyle Heights for the Nov. 4 statewide special election. InnerCity Struggle, a Boyle Heights-based group that conducts voter outreach in the Eastside, discovered the community’s lack of vote centers earlier that month while reviewing the LA County Vote Centers map.
This would have required that Boyle Heights residents travel to East LA, downtown LA or another Eastside neighborhood for their nearest vote center.
How Boyle Heights ended up without vote centers
Mike Sanchez, the senior public information specialist for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, cited the time required to recruit vote centers and noted that the special election “is not something we had in our calendar at the beginning of the year.” A community space that previously served as a polling place had been unavailable for Nov. 4, he said.
November’s special election saw just 250 vote centers across LA County, compared with 640 during last year’s general election.
On the ballot was Proposition 50, a measure to extend California’s independent redistricting commission through 2030. Statewide, turnout was 50%, with “yes” votes winning with 64.4%. In LA, turnout was 44.9%, with 74.3% voting “yes.”
Meanwhile, in Boyle Heights, data show that a total of 2,131 people cast their vote at the pop-up vote centers from Nov. 1-4, Sanchez said.
Additionally, 958 vote-by-mail ballots were returned at a pop-up vote center in Boyle Heights, he said. And, 6,074 ballots were returned to the six drop boxes within Boyle Heights.
‘Community advocacy matters’
To Efrain Escobedo, who has led national voter education initiatives and is the president of the Center for Nonprofit Management, the amount of voters who visited the Boyle Heights pop-up sites “is huge.”
“That’s a big turnout, so it means that the community was right in wanting access,” he said.
In a large and complex county like Los Angeles, Escobedo said, “community advocacy matters.”
“We need to be vigilant because election officials are dealing with a lot of different issues and if you’re not being vocal, you may be overlooked,” said Escobedo, who previously worked at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
“I would not look at this as there’s a violation of rights,” he added. “I would look at it as [the] community needs to continue to always be involved, not just in getting the vote out, but in ensuring the highest level of access to the vote.”
“This is a perfect case where the community said, ‘We want to vote in Boyle Heights, and we’re going to raise the issue and the election office was responsive,” he said.
“Voting is a community activity, and people want to vote in their neighborhoods,” Escobedo added. They don’t necessarily want to go into East LA, even though it’s East LA. They want to vote in Boyle Heights. That’s their neighborhood. That’s where they want to vote.”
This is why Henry Perez and his staff at Boyle Heights-based InnerCity Struggle raised the alarm when they discovered the community’s lack of vote centers in October.
Perez feared that voters would decide it was too difficult to get to a polling location outside their neighborhood, especially at a time when immigration raids are contributing to stress and anxiety around traveling through LA County.
Boyle Heights not having vote centers, Perez said, signals that county officials have a “lack of familiarity about the nuances of our community.”
“Unincorporated East LA is not the same as serving the community of Boyle Heights,” Perez said. “It’s a large region to cover. You are putting one community at a disadvantage when you are locating all the voting centers in the other community.”
While voting by mail and having more days to vote are good things, “the community is still adapting to these fairly recent changes and it’s going to take constant outreach, education, and information to support these communities,” Perez said.
“We learned that if we do outreach, and we focus on communities that face historic barriers and obstacles to voting, that we could collectively increase voter participation,” Perez said. “We have to do it together, from grassroots community organizations to elected officials [and] the county registrar’s office.”