Maria Teresa Kumar wakes up every single day trying to figure out how Latinos can have a bigger political voice, she told HollywoodLife in an exclusive interview. That’s why she partnered with actress and activist Rosario Dawson, who founded Voto Latino in 2004, becoming CEO and building the organization into a voting registration powerhouse.
Today, Kumar heads the organization’s 22 staffers and 7,000 volunteers, and is on a track to register at least 500,000 new young Latino voters to vote in the 2020 presidential election. By registering these voters, she is giving a political voice to under-represented Hispanic heritage voters.
And Kumar and Voto Latino don’t just register these new voters, they have successfully learned how to mobilize them, their friends and families to cast ballots. Text messaging, providing voting instructions, information about candidate choices and even the location of polling stations, all are successful tools in ensuring that Voto Latino registrants actually vote. Voto Latino does all their outreach and registration digitally, enabling the team to continue to succeed during the coronavirus pandemic.
