LATINO GROUPS LEAD VOTER DRIVE.

Byline: CHARLES F. BOSTWICK Staff Writer

PALMDALE -- A coalition of Latino organizations announced an effort to register Latino voters in Palmdale.

Volunteers will go door to door in Palmdale neighborhoods with the largest numbers of Latinos who are eligible to vote but not registered, as well as stand outside stores with heavily Latino clientele.

``It means going to the Latino community and making it a part of the American dream,'' said Xavier Flores, executive director of Pueblo Y Salud, one of the vote-drive partners.

The Antelope Valley Latino Voter Registration Education Coalition held its kickoff Monday at the new Palmdale office of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a nonprofit group that hosts citizenship and language classes but also got involved 10 years ago in a dispute during an Orange County congressional election over whether it registered noncitizens to vote.

Antelope Valley organizers said registration volunteers will be forbidden to sign up noncitizens and must ask people whether they are U.S. citizens. They said they will not turn away people of other ethnicities who want to register.

Organizers said many Latino citizens are not registered to vote because they are unaware that voters must reregister each time they move, even if it is from one house or apartment to another in the same city. The effect is great in Antelope Valley because so many residents are newcomers, and even many longtime residents switch homes, organizers said.

The registration effort is focusing on Palmdale because it is estimated to be more than half Latino and it has the valley's largest number of unregistered Latino voters, organizers said.

Flores, a Palmdale resident, said he has been involved with voter registration efforts over two decades in the San Fernando Valley that registered 55,000 voters.

``Those people were able to change the political landscape of the San Fernando Valley,'' Flores said.

Democratic 25th Congressional District candidate Robert Rodriguez and Democratic Assembly candidate Robert ``Bo'' Bynum attended the kickoff, along with Palmdale School District trustee Sandy Corrales-Eneix, who led a 2004 effort to registered some 580 voters.

Bynum said the voter registration campaign reminded him of watching television news accounts as a boy in the 1960s of civil-rights volunteers traveling the South to register African-Americans to vote.

``I can see the difference it made,'' Bynum said.