Volunteers to ensure rights of immigrants, minority voters protected on Election Day

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Community groups plan to deploy hundreds of volunteers to polling sites across Southern California on Election Day to help citizens with limited English skills.

With fears mounting that minority and immigrant voters may be intimidated at the polls on Nov. 8, non-partisan organizations in California have joined forces to help protect voter's rights.

"We are training and sending out over 600 volunteers across the state," Karin Wang of the Asian America Advancing Justice L.A. said. "We will cover more than 900 poll sites and we will be in 25 counties across the state of California on Tuesday."

The Asian Americans Advancing Justice organization said more than 2.6 million eligible voters across California are not fully proficient in English.

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A second study by the group also showed a significant voter increase in Asian communities.

"The number of Asian-American voters in the state of California: 1.8 million," Daniel Ichinose, also of the Asian America Advancing Justice L.A. said. "That's an increase of about 150,000 since the last presidential election."

Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said the county is required to provide language assistance to voters in nine different languages in addition to English.

He said every voting site will have written translated materials. In addition, Logan said more than 11,000 multilingual poll workers have been recruited.

Poll monitor volunteers said they will be watching for possible voter fraud, harassment and intimidation.

The cut off day to register to volunteer as a poll monitor is on Friday and the last training session will be on Saturday.